Saturday, October 5, 2013

UNITED STATES (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Tea Party loyalists fled the United States in the early morning hours today, seeking what one of them called “the American dream of liberty from health care.”
Harland Dorrinson, 47, a tire salesman from Lexington, Kentucky, packed up his family and whatever belongings he could fit into his Chevy Suburban just hours before the health-insurance exchanges opened, joining the Tea Party’s Freedom Caravan with one goal in mind: escape from Obamacare.
“My father didn’t have health care and neither did my father’s father before him,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my children have it.”

But after driving over ten hours to the Canadian border, Mr. Dorrinson was dismayed to learn that America’s northern neighbor had been in the iron grip of health care for decades.
“The border guard was so calm when he told me, as if it was the most normal thing in the world,” he said. “It’s like he was brainwashed by health care.”
Turning away from Canada, Mr. Dorrinson joined a procession of Tea Party cars heading south to Mexico, noting, “They may have drug cartels and narcoterrorism down there, but at least they’ve kept health care out.”
Mr. Dorrinson was halfway to the southern border before he heard through the Tea Party grapevine that Mexico, too, has public health care, as do Great Britain, Japan, Turkey, Spain, Belgium, New Zealand, Slovenia, and dozens of other countries to which he had considered fleeing.
Undaunted, Mr. Dorrinson said he had begun looking into additional countries, like Chad and North Korea, but he expressed astonishment at a world seemingly overrun by health care.
“It turns out that the United States is one of the last countries on earth to get it,” he said. “It makes me proud to be an American.”
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Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty.

32 days to #GOTV in #VA . Watch out for GOP dirty tricks

32 days to #GOTV in #VA . Watch out for GOP dirty tricks: http://t.co/yz9jl4OWVG Check your registration: https://t.co/f6c28lVYEi #libcrib
— Lisa Smirk Gonzales (@lurkingsmirking) October 4, 2013

The Theology of Government Shutdown: Christian Dominionism

Morgan Guyton

On the eve of our government shutdown, I wanted to do some research into the theological roots of Senator Ted Cruz, the standard-bearer of the Tea Party Republicans behind the shutdown. I'm interested in understanding what account of Christianity creates the "no compromise" crusade that the Tea Party has become known for. It turns out that Ted's father, Rafael Cruz, is a pastor with Texas charismatic ministry Purifying Fire International who has been campaigning against Obamacare the last several months. He has a distinct theological vision for what America is supposed to look like: Christian dominionism.
In the months building up to the present showdown, Cruz has been giving speeches at Tea Party rallies and other religious right gatherings as part of a campaign to defund Obamacare. In watching the speeches, I can see how his status as a Cuban American refugee fits the ethos of the far right culture warrior movement perfectly. He is able to shift seamlessly from stories about the oppression of the Castro regime to talking about the Obama administration.
A good example comes from a speech at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit on August 12th where Cruz said that the government's "attack on religion" is part of a longer-term plan to establish socialism:

When you hear this attack on religion, it's not really an attack on religion. The fundamental basis is this. Socialism requires that government becomes your God. That's why they have to destroy your concept of God. They have to destroy all your loyalties except loyalty to the government. That's what's behind homosexual marriage. It's really more about the destruction of the traditional family than about homosexuality, because you need also to destroy loyalty to the family.

This paragraph is a textbook example of postmodern "truthiness," in which any narrative of reality "works" as long as it's structurally logical. Cruz start with asserting the socialist conspiracy as a fundamental given and then show how it works as an explanation for everything else that's going on. It's so fascinating when the same people who declare themselves to be defenders of "absolute truth" are absolutely relativistic about truth in practice. A more disturbing element of Cruz's speeches were his repeated calls for a "black robe regiment," a concept promoted by Christian revisionist historian David Barton who claims that clergy were the main backbone of the American Revolutionary War. Here's what Cruz had to say to the August 29th gathering of Heritage Action, the main lobbyist group behind shutting down the federal government:

It was pastors who were the backbone of the Revolution. Did you know where Paul Revere was going when he was saying the British are coming? He was going to the home of a pastor by the name of Jonas Clark... [who] was one of many that were called the black robe regiment. These were pastors that wore long black robes. Many of them had the continental army uniform under the black robe. They would preach in church on Sunday and then go out and fight with half their congregation for our independence. I want to encourage our pastors today not to hide behind their pulpits but take the spirit of the black robe regiment.

The theological ethos of Rafael Cruz's vision is in Christian dominionism; he talks about preaching a "message of dominion" that all Christians have received an "anointing as kings." I watched a sermon he preached on August 26, 2012 at the New Beginnings megachurch in Irving, Texas, led by Christian Zionist charismatic pastor Larry Huch. Huch incidentally had a very interesting prophecy to share when he introduced Cruz to preach:

We've been doing this series here that God laid on my heart: Getting to the top and staying there. A message for us as individuals, the kingdom of God, but also for America. It's not enough to get there. We need to stay there. It's not a coincidence that in a few weeks, we go into what's called in the Bible Rosh Hashanad [sic]... It will be the beginning of the spiritual year 2012. The number 12 means divine government. That God will begin to rule and reign. Not Wall Street, not Washington, God's people and His kingdom will begin to rule and reign. I know that's why God got Rafael's son elected, Ted Cruz the next senator. But here's the exciting thing... The rabbinical teaching is... that in a few weeks begins that year 2012 and that this will begin what we call the end-time transfer of wealth. And that when these Gentiles begin to receive this blessing, they will never go back financially through the valley again. They will grow and grow and grow. It's said this way: that God is looking at the church and everyone in it and deciding in the next three and a half years who will be his bankers. And the ones that say here I am Lord, you can trust me, we will become so blessed that we will usher in the coming of the messiah.

So it sounds like we're entering into the age where the Christians (who give faithfully) are going to get all the money through the "end-time transfer of wealth." Isn't the title of that sermon series just awesome? Getting to the Top and Staying There! It was a packed house. I wonder how many other apocalyptic prosperity gospel megachurches are packing their houses by preaching sermon series about getting to the top and staying there. Cruz's primary text for his sermon was Revelation 1:5-6, which says, "To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father--to him be glory and power for ever and ever!" In Rafael's translation of the Bible, it says "kings and priests" instead of "a kingdom and priests." In the Greek, the word is basileian (accusative singular) and no manuscript variants are indicated, but never mind that.
Cruz shares that two types of people were anointed in the Old Testament, kings and priests:

Priests were anointed primarily to minister the glory of God. They were anointed to pray for the people, to offer sacrifices, to care for the temple, to be God's representatives before the people... Kings were anointed to take dominion. Kings were anointed to go to war, win the war, and bring the spoils of war to priests so the work of the kingdom of God could be accomplished. The king needed the blessing of the priest in order to be successful in battle... The priest also needed for the king to be successful in battle because the priest needed the spoils of war in order to repair the temple, in order to carry out the ministry that God had entrusted him.

What is so remarkable about this rendering of the relationship between kings and priests in the Old Testament is that God expressly forbade the Israelites from going to war for spoils. It is "truthiness" applied to Biblical interpretation. Well, the priests had expenses to pay in the temple, and the kings went to war. God anointed both of them. That must mean that the kings went to war to pay for the expenses in the temple. The seamless move that Cruz makes without any justification is to say that because kings and priests were anointed in the Old Testament, that means there are two kinds of Christians today: kings and priests. Forget about the body of Christ and all the spiritual gifts identified in 1 Corinthians 12. Forget Jesus' exhortation in Mark 10 not to be like the Gentile princes but to be servants instead of kings. Cruz decries the way that churches have neglected their members' kingly anointing:

Our churches unfortunately are very focused on only one of these anointings and that is on the priestly anointing... Those of you who think you don't have the anointing to teach the word of God, to be teaching Sunday school, you're second class citizens. And so you begin to lead frustrated lives... The majority of you... your anointing... is an anointing as king. God has given you an anointing to go to the battlefield. And what's the battlefield? The marketplace. To go to the marketplace and occupy the land. To go to the marketplace and take dominion.

So to pull all this logic together, God anoints priests to work in the church directly and kings to go out into the marketplace to conquer, plunder, and bring back the spoils to the church. The reason governmental regulation has to disappear from the marketplace is to make it completely available to the plunder of Christian "kings" who will accomplish the "end time transfer of wealth." Then "God's bankers" will usher in the "coming of the messiah." The government is being shut down so that God's bankers can bring Jesus back. And here's the thing. When you get a lot of people together in a megachurch, you can do some pretty impressive things with your mission projects. You can feed thousands of people and host ESL classes and job training programs and medical clinics. And I imagine that seeing your accomplishments could give you the hubris of thinking we don't need a government at all to make our society run; our church can be the new government.

Our Founding Fathers included Islam

Thomas Jefferson didn't just own a Quran -- he engaged with Islam and fought to ensure the rights of Muslims

By Denise Spellberg

[He] sais “neither Pagan nor Mahamedan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.”  — Thomas Jefferson, quoting John Locke, 1776 
At a time when most Americans were uninformed, misinformed, or simply afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson imagined Muslims as future citizens of his new nation. His engagement with the faith began with the purchase of a Qur’an eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s Qur’an survives still in the Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early America’s complex relationship with Islam and its adherents. That relationship remains of signal importance to this day.
That he owned a Qur’an reveals Jefferson’s interest in the Islamic religion, but it does not explain his support for the rights of Muslims. Jefferson first read about Muslim “civil rights” in the work of one of his intellectual heroes: the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. Locke had advocated the toleration of Muslims—and Jews—following in the footsteps of a few others in Europe who had considered the matter for more than a century before him. Jefferson’s ideas about Muslim rights must be understood within this older context, a complex set of transatlantic ideas that would continue to evolve most markedly from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.
Amid the interdenominational Christian violence in Europe, some Christians, beginning in the sixteenth century, chose Muslims as the test case for the demarcation of the theoretical boundaries of their toleration for all believers. Because of these European precedents, Muslims also became a part of American debates about religion and the limits of citizenship. As they set about creating a new government in the United States, the American Founders, Protestants all, frequently referred to the adherents of Islam as they contemplated the proper scope of religious freedom and individual rights among the nation’s present and potential inhabitants. The founding generation debated whether the United States should be exclusively Protestant or a religiously plural polity. And if the latter, whether political equality—the full rights of citizenship, including access to the highest office—should extend to non-Protestants. The mention, then, of Muslims as potential citizens of the United States forced the Protestant majority to imagine the parameters of their new society beyond toleration. It obliged them to interrogate the nature of religious freedom: the issue of a “religious test” in the Constitution, like the ones that would exist at the state level into the nineteenth century; the question of “an establishment of religion,” potentially of Protestant Christianity; and the meaning and extent of a separation of religion from government.
Resistance to the idea of Muslim citizenship was predictable in the eighteenth century. Americans had inherited from Europe almost a millennium of negative distortions of the faith’s theological and political character. Given the dominance and popularity of these anti-Islamic representations, it was startling that a few notable Americans not only refused to exclude Muslims, but even imagined a day when they would be citizens of the United States, with full and equal rights. This surprising, uniquely American egalitarian defense of Muslim rights was the logical extension of European precedents already mentioned. Still, on both sides of the Atlantic, such ideas were marginal at best. How, then, did the idea of the Muslim as a citizen with rights survive despite powerful opposition from the outset? And what is the fate of that ideal in the twenty-first century?

This book provides a new history of the founding era, one that explains how and why Thomas Jefferson and a handful of others adopted and then moved beyond European ideas about the toleration of Muslims. It should be said at the outset that these exceptional men were not motivated by any inherent appreciation for Islam as a religion. Muslims, for most American Protestants, remained beyond the outer limit of those possessing acceptable beliefs, but they nevertheless became emblems of two competing conceptions of the nation’s identity: one essentially preserving the Protestant status quo, and the other fully realizing the pluralism implied in the Revolutionary rhetoric of inalienable and universal rights. Thus while some fought to exclude a group whose inclusion they feared would ultimately portend the undoing of the nation’s Protestant character, a pivotal minority, also Protestant, perceiving the ultimate benefit and justice of a religiously plural America, set about defending the rights of future Muslim citizens.
They did so, however, not for the sake of actual Muslims, because none were known at the time to live in America. Instead, Jefferson and others defended Muslim rights for the sake of “imagined Muslims,” the promotion of whose theoretical citizenship would prove the true universality of American rights. Indeed, this defense of imagined Muslims would also create political room to consider the rights of other despised minorities whose numbers in America, though small, were quite real, namely Jews and Catholics. Although it was Muslims who embodied the ideal of inclusion, Jews and Catholics were often linked to them in early American debates, as Jefferson and others fought for the rights of all non-Protestants.
In 1783, the year of the nation’s official independence from Great Britain, George Washington wrote to recent Irish Catholic immigrants in New York City. The American Catholic minority of roughly twenty-five thousand then had few legal protections in any state and, because of their faith, no right to hold political office in New York. Washington insisted that “the bosom of America” was “open to receive . . . the oppressed and the persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.” He would also write similar missives to Jewish communities, whose total population numbered only about two thousand at this time.
One year later, in 1784, Washington theoretically enfolded Muslims into his private world at Mount Vernon. In a letter to a friend seeking a carpenter and bricklayer to help at his Virginia home, he explained that the workers’ beliefs—or lack thereof—mattered not at all: “If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans [Muslims], Jews or Christian of an[y] Sect, or they may be Atheists.” Clearly, Muslims were part of Washington’s understanding of religious pluralism—at least in theory. But he would not have actually expected any Muslim applicants.
Although we have since learned that there were in fact Muslims resident in eighteenth-century America, this book demonstrates that the Founders and their generational peers never knew it. Thus their Muslim constituency remained an imagined, future one. But the fact that both Washington and Jefferson attached to it such symbolic significance is not accidental. Both men were heir to the same pair of opposing European traditions.
The first, which predominated, depicted Islam as the antithesis of the “true faith” of Protestant Christianity, as well as the source of tyrannical governments abroad. To tolerate Muslims—to accept them as part of a majority Protestant Christian society—was to welcome people who professed a faith most eighteenth-century Europeans and Americans believed false, foreign, and threatening. Catholics would be similarly characterized in American Protestant founding discourse. Indeed, their faith, like Islam, would be deemed a source of tyranny and thus antithetical to American ideas of liberty.
In order to counter such fears, Jefferson and other supporters of non-Protestant citizenship drew upon a second, less popular but crucial stream of European thought, one that posited the toleration of Muslims as well as Jews and Catholics. Those few Europeans, both Catholic and Protestant, who first espoused such ideas in the sixteenth century often died for them. In the seventeenth century, those who advocated universal religious toleration frequently suffered death or imprisonment, banishment or exile, the elites and common folk alike. The ranks of these so-called heretics in Europe included Catholic and Protestant peasants, Protestant scholars of religion and political theory, and fervid Protestant dissenters, such as the first English Baptists—but no people of political power or prominence. Despite not being organized, this minority consistently opposed their coreligionists by defending theoretical Muslims from persecution in Christian-majority states.
As a member of the eighteenth-century Anglican establishment and a prominent political leader in Virginia, Jefferson represented a different sort of proponent for ideas that had long been the hallmark of dissident victims of persecution and exile. Because of his elite status, his own endorsement of Muslim citizenship demanded serious consideration in Virginia—and the new nation. Together with a handful of like-minded American Protestants, he advanced a new, previously unthinkable national blueprint. Thus did ideas long on the fringe of European thought flow into the mainstream of American political discourse at its inception.
Not that these ideas found universal welcome. Even a man of Jefferson’s national reputation would be attacked by his political opponents for his insistence that the rights of all believers should be protected from government interference and persecution. But he drew support from a broad range of constituencies, including Anglicans (or Episcopalians), as well as dissenting Presbyterians and Baptists, who suffered persecution perpetrated by fellow Protestants. No denomination had a unanimously positive view of non-Protestants as full American citizens, yet support for Muslim rights was expressed by some members of each.
What the supporters of Muslim rights were proposing was extraordinary even at a purely theoretical level in the eighteenth century. American citizenship—which had embraced only free, white, male Protestants—was in effect to be abstracted from religion. Race and gender would continue as barriers, but not so faith. Legislation in Virginia would be just the beginning, the First Amendment far from the end of the story; in fact, Jefferson, Washington, and James Madison would work toward this ideal of separation throughout their entire political lives, ultimately leaving it to others to carry on and finish the job. This book documents, for the first time, how Jefferson and others, despite their negative, often incorrect understandings of Islam, pursued that ideal by advocating the rights of Muslims and all non-Protestants.
A decade before George Washington signaled openness to Muslim laborers in 1784 he had listed two slave women from West Africa among his taxable property. “Fatimer” and “Little Fatimer” were a mother and daughter—both indubitably named after the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima (d. 632). Washington advocated Muslim rights, never realizing that as a slaveholder he was denying Muslims in his own midst any rights at all, including the right to practice their faith. This tragic irony may well have also recurred on the plantations of Jefferson and Madison, although proof of their slaves’ religion remains less than definitive. Nevertheless, having been seized and transported from West Africa, the first American Muslims may have numbered in the tens of thousands, a population certainly greater than the resident Jews and possibly even the Catholics. Although some have speculated that a few former Muslim slaves may have served in the Continental Army, there is little direct evidence any practiced Islam and none that these individuals were known to the Founders. In any case, they had no influence on later political debates about Muslim citizenship.
The insuperable facts of race and slavery rendered invisible the very believers whose freedoms men like Jefferson, Washington, and Madison defended, and whose ancestors had resided in America since the seventeenth century, as long as Protestants had. Indeed, when the Founders imagined future Muslim citizens, they presumably imagined them as white, because by the 1790s “full American citizenship could be claimed by any free, white immigrant, regardless of ethnicity or religious beliefs.”
The two actual Muslims Jefferson would wittingly meet during his lifetime were not black West African slaves but North African ambassadors of Turkish descent. They may have appeared to him to have more melanin than he did, but he never commented on their complexions or race. (Other observers either failed to mention it or simply affirmed that the ambassador in question was not black.) But then Jefferson was interested in neither diplomat for reasons of religion or race; he engaged them because of their political power. (They were, of course, also free.)
But even earlier in his political life—as an ambassador, secretary of state, and vice president—Jefferson had never perceived a predominantly religious dimension to the conflict with North African Muslim powers, whose pirates threatened American shipping in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. As this book demonstrates, Jefferson as president would insist to the rulers of Tripoli and Tunis that his nation harbored no anti-Islamic bias, even going so far as to express the extraordinary claim of believing in the same God as those men.
The equality of believers that Jefferson sought at home was the same one he professed abroad, in both contexts attempting to divorce religion from politics, or so it seemed. In fact, Jefferson’s limited but unique appreciation for Islam appears as a minor but active element in his presidential foreign policy with North Africa—and his most personal Deist and Unitarian beliefs. The two were quite possibly entwined, with their source Jefferson’s unsophisticated yet effective understanding of the Qur’an he owned.
Still, as a man of his time, Jefferson was not immune to negative feelings about Islam. He would even use some of the most popular anti-Islamic images inherited from Europe to drive his early political arguments about the separation of religion from government in Virginia. Yet ultimately Jefferson and others not as well known were still able to divorce the idea of Muslim citizenship from their dislike of Islam, as they forged an “imagined political community,” inclusive beyond all precedent.
The clash between principle and prejudice that Jefferson himself overcame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains a test for the nation in the twenty-first. Since the late nineteenth century, the United States has in fact become home to a diverse and dynamic American Muslim citizenry, but this population has never been fully welcomed. Whereas in Jefferson’s time organized prejudice against Muslims was exercised against an exclusively foreign and imaginary nonresident population, today political attacks target real, resident American Muslim citizens. Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror, a public discourse of anti-Muslim bigotry has arisen to justify depriving American Muslim citizens of the full and equal exercise of their civil rights.
For example, recent anti-Islamic slurs used to deny the legitimacy of a presidential candidacy contained eerie echoes of founding precedents. The legal possibility of a Muslim president was first discussed with vitriol during debates involving America’s Founders. Thomas Jefferson would be the first in the history of American politics to suffer the false charge of being a Muslim, an accusation considered the ultimate Protestant slur in the eighteenth century. That a presidential candidate in the twenty-first century should have been subject to much the same false attack, still presumed as politically damning to any real American Muslim candidate’s potential for elected office, demonstrates the importance of examining how the multiple images of Islam and Muslims first entered American consciousness and how the rights of Muslims first came to be accepted as national ideals. Ultimately, the status of Muslim citizenship in America today cannot be properly appreciated without establishing the historical context of its eighteenth-century origins.
Muslim American rights became a theoretical reality early on, but as a practical one they have been much slower to evolve. In fact, they are being tested daily. Recently, John Esposito, a distinguished historian of Islam in contemporary America, observed, “Muslims are led to wonder: What are the limits of this Western pluralism?” Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an documents the origins of such pluralism in the United States in order to illuminate where, when, and how Muslims were first included in American ideals.
Until now, most historians have proposed that Muslims represented nothing more than the incarnated antithesis of American values. These same voices also insist that Protestant Americans always and uniformly defined both the religion of Islam and its practitioners as inherently un-American. Indeed, most historians posit that the emergence of the United States as an ideological and political phenomenon occurred in opposition to eighteenth-century concepts about Islam as a false religion and source of despotic government. There is certainly evidence for these assumptions in early American religious polemic, domestic politics, foreign policy, and literary sources. There are, however, also considerable observations about Islam and Muslims that cast both in a more affirmative light, including key references to Muslims as future American citizens in important founding debates about rights. These sources show that American Protestants did not monolithically view Islam as “a thoroughly foreign religion.”
This book documents the counterassertion that Muslims, far from being definitively un-American, were deeply embedded in the concept of citizenship in the United States since the country’s inception, even if these inclusive ideas were not then accepted by the majority of Americans. While focusing on Jefferson’s views of Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic world, it also analyzes the perspectives of John Adams and James Madison. Nor is it limited to these key Founders. The cast of those who took part in the contest concerning the rights of Muslims, imagined and real, is not confined to famous political elites but includes Presbyterian and Baptist protestors against Virginia’s religious establishment; the Anglican lawyers James Iredell and Samuel Johnston in North Carolina, who argued for the rights of Muslims in their state’s constitutional ratifying convention; and John Leland, an evangelical Baptist preacher and ally of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia, who agitated in Connecticut and Massachusetts in support of Muslim equality, the Constitution, the First Amendment, and the end of established religion at the state level.
The lives of two American Muslim slaves of West African origin, Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, also intersect this narrative. Both were literate in Arabic, the latter writing his autobiography in that language. They remind us of the presence of tens of thousands of Muslim slaves who had no rights, no voice, and no hope of American citizenship in the midst of these early discussions about religious and political equality for future, free practitioners of Islam.
Imagined Muslims, along with real Jews and Catholics, were the consummate outsiders in much of America’s political discourse at the founding. Jews and Catholics would struggle into the twentieth century to gain in practice the equal rights assured them in theory, although even this process would not entirely eradicate prejudice against either group. Nevertheless, from among the original triad of religious outsiders in the United States, only Muslims remain the objects of a substantial civic discourse of derision and marginalization, still being perceived in many quarters as not fully American. This book writes Muslims back into our founding narrative in the hope of clarifying the importance of critical historical precedents at a time when the idea of the Muslim as citizen is, once more, hotly contested.
Excerpted from “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an” by Denise A. Spellberg. Copyright © 2013 by Denise A. Spellberg. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

More Denise Spellberg.

Garrison Keillor on what GOP has become: "corporate shills, faith-based economists... bullies w/ Bibles"

--->Yowwch! Garrison Keillor on what GOP has become: "corporate shills, faith-based economists... bullies w/ Bibles" pic.twitter.com/O8PzyQNMYS
— AverageChirps (@AverageChirps) October 4, 2013

REBOOT CONGRESS

Ayn Rand And The Sociopathic Society or ‘How I Learned To Stop Loving My Neighbor And Despise Them Instead.’

Ayn Rand And The Sociopathic Society

or ‘How I Learned To Stop Loving My Neighbor And Despise Them Instead.’

by Justin Rosario

A fat, smug bastard friend of mine (that’s his chosen nickname, The FSB) pointed out to me some time ago that pretty much ALL conservative politics are selfish at their core. Take any conservative position on a social or economic issue and boil away all the rhetoric and what you are left with is “I got mine, screw you.”
I thought about that for a while. I suppose its simplicity struck me as being a little too easy, a little too sound bitey. So I sat down and made a list:

No gay marriage – Homosexuality makes me uncomfortable (due to misguided religious influence, poor upbringing or both) so gay people should be punished because of my beliefs. Stoopid homos…
No welfare, food stamps or Medicaid – I’m not poor enough to qualify for these programs so my tax dollars shouldn’t pay for it. Stoopid poor people and by poor I really mean black…
No health care reform – Why should I help pay for other people who are sick when I’m not? Stoopid sick people…
No environmental protection – Environmental laws makes things more expensive for me and that’s bad. I also don’t understand the concept of long term impact; I want cheap gas and gadgets now! Stoopid…ah, you get the idea…
Don’t raise my taxes – EVER. The government can find its own money to pay for stuff.
Medicare – Young conservatives: Why should I help pay for old people and the disabled? Older conservatives: Keep your government hands off my Medicare!
Social Security – Young conservatives: Sacrifices need to be made, people should take care of themselves, not depend on handouts from people like me. Older conservatives: Sacrifices need to be made BUT DON’T YOU TOUCH MY SOCIAL SECURITY!
No abortion – The government should tell women what to do with their bodies because Idon’t like abortion.
No prayer in school? – GOVERNMENT OVERREACH!! I like Republican Jesus™ so everyone should have to listen to my prayers. No Muslim prayers, though. That’s indoctrination.

This list goes on for some time. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became. A conservative society is a borderline sociopathic society.
Dictionary.com defines a sociopath as: a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.
Conservapedia says a sociopath is “someone with a personality disorder characterized by an antisocial behavior and an absence of moral responsibility or social conscience.” (I would have cited Wikipedia but we all know they’re a liberal front for George Soros, I think I heard that on Glenn Beck)
The key words here are “moral responsibility” and “social conscience”. Conservative politics lack these essential characteristics. In their place we find greed, hate, lies, an inability to empathize and an overblown sense of entitlement and self importance. In other words: all the indicators of a seriously disturbed person. Except it’s a political philosophy and it has millions of disciples.
But Justin, you filthy liberal scum, how can you say that?
Well, that’s kind of easy. Who is the guiding light of conservatives (and Libertarians) all the way from corrupt CEOs down to easily manipulated Tea Party fanatics? Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand’s specific worldview was that “The pursuit of his (man’s) own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.” This is in direct opposition to a functional humane society where the whole must be cohesive in order to provide for its weakest and most vulnerable. You’ll notice my inclusion of the word “humane”. You can have a perfectly functional society without a shred of humanity in it. Take, for example, the Industrial Age societies. They literally built the foundations for the world we know and yet they allowed or even encouraged child labor; essentially the slavery of children. Speaking of slavery, they had THAT, too, and no matter what Haley Barbour, Pat Buchanan and the other apologists revisionists would have you think, it was horrible and inhumane.
Ayn Rand’s ideal world is one where society has no say in your actions short of you physically assaulting another person. “The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force.”[ii] One is forced to wonder what she would make of Wall Street’s Epic Fail. Rand was a big champion of no regulation at all. Close your eyes and imagine what Wall Street could do with even less regulation than it had before. Think of all the possibilities. Taste the freedom.
Are you done vomiting yet?
Do you know why Rand’s laissez-faire utopia would fail? It’s the exact same reason a socialist utopia would fail; people are imperfect. We are greedy, envious, petty and selfish. There will always be some among us who will better themselves specifically to the detriment of others because they simply don’t care. There will always be those who, as they gain power and wealth, will want more at any expense. We saw this in action in communist Russia. It was rife with the kind of corruption described so very well in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Everyone was equal, but some were more equal than others.
We see it today in that bastion of capitalism: America and its budding Oligarchy. As wealth and power becomes ever more concentrated, the rest of us suffer. Any attempts to remedy the situation by imposing restrictions on the rich and powerful to keep them from fleecing the country is met with howls of “class warfare”, “Socialism” and “government overreach.” Any attempts to remove any of the sweetheart deals in place allowing those same anti-government rich and powerful to pay less taxes (or no taxes at all) or to reap billions in unnecessary subsidies are also met with more howls of unfair treatment.
Now that’s what I call having your cake and eating it, too.
These people are sociopaths, pure and simple. As long as they get what they “deserve”, it doesn’t matter what happens to anyone else. Homeless families are not their problem. Malnourished children are not their problem. Uninsured sick people are not their problem. The elderly reduced to abject poverty (as they were before the advent of Social Security) are not their problem.
Ayn Rand and her delusional rantings provide a rationalization for this immoral behavior. After the Enron scandal and again after the crash in 2008, CEOs started to reread Atlas Shrugged. “CEOs put the book down knowing in their hearts that they are not the greedy crooks they are portrayed to be in today’s business headlines but are heroes like the characters in Rand’s novel.”[iii]
Heroes? Really? Is that so?
I would love to walk a group of Wall Street executives out to a Tea Party rally and have them explain to the crowd all the ways these “heroes” have stolen away the TPers money and future. Then announce that it’s OK because Ayn Rand says self interest and greed are good so whatever these “heroes” do in pursuit of that goal is morally just, even necessary. I figure the cognitive dissonance would make at least half of the crowd’s heads explode.
Mahatma Ghandi said a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. By this very simple criterion, the conservative sociopathic society would be found wanting and yet the conservative movement claims to be the party of God, family and human decency. It is none of these things.

How Dummies Sell Their Boehner

When Dummies Listen

Mitt Romney The Musical

Asshole of the Day, October 4, 2013

Asshole of the Day, October 4, 2013: Randy Neugebauer
by TeaPartyCat ()

ATTENTION REPUBLICAN ASSSHOLES: The government shutdown is yours, yours, yours. You threatned it. You bragged about it. Ted Cruz spent 21 hours saying how it needed to be done to stop Obamacare. It’s yours.
And is it really plausible, after 5 years of slurring Obama and his love of Big Government, that people would even believe for a second that the shutdown was Obama’s idea or his fault? You profess to hate government and claim Obama loves it, so this doesn’t even pass the smell test.
But apparently that won’t stop you assholes from trying to pretend it’s not yours when it turns out people don’t like it.
Yesterday Ted Cruz said that the shutdown would make America vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Look, buddy, it’s your shutdown— if you’re scared, end it.
And then Rep. Randy Neugebauer harassed a park ranger who was keeping people out of the World War II Memorial because it was shut down:

Neugebauer: “How do you look at them and … deny them access?”
Ranger: “It’s difficult.”
Neugebauer: “Well, it should be difficult.”
Ranger: “It is difficult. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Neugebauer: “The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves.”
Ranger: “I’m not ashamed.”
Neugebauer: “You should be.”.

If only that ranger had said “Look, Asshole, it’s your shutdown. You voted for it. YOU should be ashamed.”
Full story: http://gawker.com/gop-congressman-makes-park-ranger-apologize-for-shutdow-1440577868
For a satirical look at the GOP’s deranged plans to stop Obamacare no matter how much it hurts the America they profess to love so much, read my post at WinkProgress: Defund Obamacare Or Else! which also has many hilarious suggestions from Twitter.

Obama Does Not Rule Out Taking Action On The Debt Ceiling By Himself

Brett LoGiurato

Read into this what you will, but President Barack Obama did not specifically rule out working around Congress to raise the nation's borrowing limit if Congress does not permit a hike before an Oct. 17 deadline. In an interview with The Associated Press that was published on Saturday, Obama ducked the question of whether he is "willing to take other action" to prevent default. He only said that he expected Congress would pass a bill to raise it.
Here's the key exchange:

Q: But if they don't, if they get up to this deadline and they are not willing to pass this clean debt ceiling that you're asking them to do, would you be willing to take other action to prevent default?

THE PRESIDENT: I don't expect to get there. There were at least some quotes yesterday that Speaker Boehner is willing to make sure that we don't default. And just as is true with the government shutdown, there are enough votes in the House of Representatives to make sure that the government reopens today. And I'm pretty willing to bet that there are enough votes in the House of Representatives right now to make sure that the United States doesn't end up being a deadbeat. The only thing that's preventing that from happening is Speaker Boehner calling the vote.

The possibility that Obama will have to work around Congress to raise the debt has been increasingly discussed by analysts over the past week.

Some — including President Bill Clinton — have said he can do that by invoking the 14th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era amendment that says that "the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned."

But usually, he and members of his administration make a point of noting that it is not a legally-tenable option. Just this past week, on a conference call previewing a report warning of the economic catastrophe of breaching the debt ceiling, a Treasury Department official said the administration doesn't believe anyone except Congress can raise the debt ceiling.

And here's what Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters in the daily press briefing on Thursday:

"This administration does not believe that the 14th Amendment gives the power to the President to ignore the debt ceiling. So we do not believe that the 14th Amendment provides that authority to the President. Moreover, even if the President could ignore the debt ceiling, the fact that there is significant controversy around the President’s authority to act unilaterally means that it would not be a credible alternative to Congress raising the debt ceiling and would not be taken seriously by the global economy or the markets."

The 14th Amendment

An Eye on Congressional Leadership

Thelma and Louise do the Tea Party

Wrong Side of History

Timothy Egan

Sarah Palin finally got her death panels — a direct blow from the Republican House. In shutting down the government, leaving 800,000 people without a paycheck and draining the economy of $300 million a day, the Party of Madness also took away last-chance cancer trials for children at the National Institutes of Health.
And now that the pain that was dismissed as a trifle on Monday, a “slimdown” according to the chuckleheads at Fox News, is revealed as tragic by mid-week, the very radicals who caused the havoc are trying to say it’s not their fault.
It’s too late. They flunked hostage-taking. About 30 or so Republicans in the House, bunkered in gerrymandered districts while breathing the oxygen of delusion, are now part of a cast of miscreants who have stood firmly on the wrong side of history. The headline, today and 50 years from now, will be the same: Republicans closed the government to keep millions of their fellow Americans from getting affordable health care.
They are not righteous rebels or principled provocateurs. They are not constitutionalists, using the ruling framework built by the founders. Just the opposite: they are a militant fringe of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government trying to nullify an established law by extortion. This is not the design of the Constitution.

Nor are they Martin Luther King Jr., or Rosa Parks or Winston Churchill — preposterous comparisons made on the floor of Congress by those whose only real fight is with progress.
In truth, they are the Know-Nothings from the 1850s who fought Irish Catholics and other castoffs from distant lands, vowing to keep them from becoming citizens. Their incarnation today is the Tea Party Republicans who call Latinos drug mules and would rather strangle the federal government than take up immigration reform.
They are the opponents of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, labeling what are now the two most popular government programs as socialism that would destroy the country. They are the foes of science and modernism, denying evolution, climate change and, on election nights, math.
Over the years, whether Democrat, Republican, Whig or Dixiecrat, the members of this club have one thing in common: they are left at the train station of destiny, and never realize it until it’s too late.
So of course they have no exit strategy. “We have to get something out of this,” said Representative Martin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana. “And I don’t know what that even is.” Truer words have not been spoken by any member of the Crazy Caucus since they took the House in 2010.
You have to step back from the breathless tick-tock of the 24-hour news cycle to put this grim chapter in larger perspective. “Can you remember a time in your lifetime when a major political party was just sitting around, begging for America to fail?” So asked a perplexed Bill Clinton a few days ago.
The answer is no. What kind of failure are we talking about? Not just to equity markets, jobs, the mechanics of daily life in the world’s biggest economy. The shutdown stops research on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, cancer treatments. Two-thirds of the employees at the Centers for Disease Control were sent home. Many food inspectors, people who train air traffic controllers, anti-terrorism experts — all furloughed. And shed a tear for Yosemite National Park on its 123rd birthday Monday. America’s Best Idea — as the parks are called — couldn’t compete with America’s Worst Idea, the Tea Party Republicans.
And let’s never forget that these sacrifices, real and lasting, are being made for one thing: to block health care reform. Obamacare, when its component parts are explained to people, is enormously popular. Take one of the most profound features of the law — the ban on denying insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Nearly half of all Americans fit that category. The insurances exchanges, for all their computer glitches, are flooded with interest.
We know now why Senator Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Washington, said he fears that once Obamacare is up and running people will like it — and then it will be too late for the obstructionists.
Politically, the shutdown is terrible for a party trying to rebrand itself. When Bobby Jindal said Republicans have to “stop being the party of stupid,” he swallowed a teaspoon of common sense. That’s been washed away by a river of stupid.
This week’s Quinnipiac Poll found 72 percent of Americans opposed to shutting down the government to halt the Affordable Care Act. When asked to pick a party in a generic Congressional matchup, those surveyed chose Democrats over Republicans, 43 percent to 34 — the widest measure in recent polling.
Those numbers won’t penetrate the gerrymandered fortresses that produced the people who have made our democracy a laughing stock of the world.
“We’re right,” crowed Representative Steve King of Iowa.
“We can always win,” seconded Representative Raúl Labrador of Idaho.
Say it enough times, and it’ll be true, like Karl Rove’s gasping on election night that Obama had not yet won. But the die is cast. They wrecked the car, dug their own grave; no matter what you call it, history’s verdict came early.

Growing Up Paul Part One .

.Why Dummies Believe Fake Movements Are Real .

Friday, October 4, 2013

Fox News sued for broadcasting Arizona man’s suicide

By David Ferguson

Fox News host Shepard Smith apologizes for broadcasting video of a man committing suicide. Photo: Screenshot via YouTube.

A woman who watched her brother commit suicide on the air filed suit Thursday in Maricopa County Court against News Corp, Fox News LLP and several affiliate stations, saying that she was “severely traumatized” by the event. According to Courthouse News Service, Nature Romero was shocked and horrified to see her brother JoDon Romero shoot himself in the head in real time on Sep. 28, 2012 at the end of a car chase with police.
The video was broadcast on Fox News Channel’s afternoon program, “Studio B with Shepard Smith.”
“The 80-mile chase ended in the desert near Salome, Arizona,” the complaint said. “The driver of the pursued vehicle jumped out of the car and began running through the desert. These events were televised live on ‘Studio B’ via a feed from the helicopter of the Fox local affiliate in Phoenix.”
Normally the program runs a time-delay feature to keep from airing offensive material, but on the day in question, it appears that the delay was not operating.
“Viewers of ‘Studio B’ saw the events unfold at the exact time they happened without the several second delay,” the report explained. Anchor Shepard Smith, realizing what was about to happen, shouted at producers to shut down the feed.
“Shepard Smith, acknowledging that what was about to occur ‘didn’t belong on television’ began urging his control room to ‘get off’ — repeating the phrase more than 10 times in rapid succession before yelling ‘Get off it!’” the suit alleges.
“The television viewing public watching ‘Studio B,’ including plaintiff, saw a live full screen broadcast of the driver raising a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. The broadcast of the scene continued as the driver’s lifeless body collapsed forward,” it read.
Romero is seeking punitive damages claiming emotional distress and negligence. She is also asking that Fox News cover the costs resulting necessitated by her decision to seek treatment for the sleeplessness, headaches and depression that followed in the wake of watching her brother’s suicide alongside millions of viewers.
A Fox News spokesperson told Courthouse News that it has not seen the lawsuit and declined to comment further.

The 1% Simpson's Style

Thanks to Andy Borowitz for this great quote.

More government shutdown humor: http://abt.cm/1g4SoV5

Republican Jesus ™

Author: Justin "Filthy Liberal Scum" Rosario

Or “How I Learned to Stop Thinking for Myself and Just Trust Republican Jesus.”
When I was a kid, I was taught that the Pilgrims fled to the New World to escape religious persecution. Somewhere in there, I learned that we don’t have a national religion and people were free to practice whatever religion they wanted. That was kind of it as far as religion went in my history classes and overall education. Sure, Jews were mentioned in the context of the Holocaust but more as a race than a religion. I did, however, attend Synagogue for a few years as an adolescent. I viewed it more as learning my heritage as opposed to actively worshiping. Even then, I was not inclined towards belief. Probably because my parents were more interested in making sure I was curious about stuff instead of learning any particular dogma. Religion was, for me, just something that other people did. It would be many years before I understood I was an atheist and even more years until I stumbled across Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al and learned how to verbalize it.
Through all of this, it never occurred to me that I would ever have to worry about a particular set of religious values being forced upon me. I always assumed that religion was a private thing, practiced in one’s home or place of worship. That was it. Even in college, I rarely came across any real religious zeal. I once took a trip down to Washington DC with the Young Republicans club because they were my friends and they invited me to go. I got to meet Oliver North (yay me?) who was so exact in his pose with each of us, from me at 6’2” to little Jen, all of 5’1”, that to this day, I cannot convince people the pictures are not of us next to a cardboard cutout.But even with the Young Republicans during that first Bush presidency, I wasn’t assaulted with any kind of religious politics. I did find a good deal of racism which gave me a big clue about how Republicans see the world. I was totally apolitical at the time and had no idea what the difference between a Democrat and a Republican was. I didn’t read, or watch, the news and no one had ever mentioned it in any of my classes. My political education was also sorely lacking. It irritates me when I think back on it. Fast forward to the George W. Bush years. I had been aware of the Evangelical movement back in the 80s but Creationism still wasn’t being taught in schools and Roe v. Wade hadn’t been overturned on religious grounds. But during Bush’s tenure, I started hearing the more than occasional remark about how not believing in God makes you a bad American and if you were a LIBERAL that didn’t believe in God? Scum of the Earth! Wait a minute. Not believing in God (or, more precisely, not believing in a very specific version of God) makes me a bad American? How does that even work? This country was founded on religious freedom and the explicit separation of Church and State, wasn’t it? And that’s when I became acquainted with Republican Jesus ™.

Who the hell is Republican Jesus ™?

Republican Jesus ™ is very different than the Jesus you and I are familiar with. First off, he is White. Not just white, but White. Republican Jesus ™ has a special place in his heart for America. Specifically, White America. Do you doubt this? Ask yourself why anyone who believes in a colorblind Jesus would even conceive of praying for the death of Obama? No, only those who follow Republican Jesus ™ would even think that such a prayer could, or should, be answered. If you are currently thinking that racism has nothing to do with the unprecedented hatred of Obama, go away, I’m talking to the grownups.
Republican Jesus ™, by the way, is a big supporter of the Confederacy. Why he let them lose the War of Northern Aggression is a mystery. But all “real” Americans know that the South will rise again and Republican Jesus ™ will lead the way back to glory. Or something like that. How the Northern and Mid-western Red states fit into this Southern revival is also a mystery.
Republican Jesus ™ loves guns. Loves them! Never mind all that silly talk of beating swords into plowshares! Every good member of the church of Republican Jesus ™ should have, at minimum, enough armament to hold off an invasion by those commie Nazi liberal hordes that are coming any day now. Or the ATF, whichever shows up first. Or maybe just enough to wipe out a schoolroom filled with kids when their excellent parenting skills manifest themselves in the next Columbine tragedy.
Remember, conservatives, to complain about anti-bullying programs being government overreach afterwards!
Republican Jesus ™ loves the rich. Ignore that whole “camel through the eye of a needle” garbage. Republican Jesus ™ wants you to be prosperous! It’s called “prosperity theology” and it percolates throughout the conservative religious fervor. God rewards the faithful with material wealth. Very spiritual stuff. If your idea of spiritual is a McMansion.
But Republican Jesus ™ is not just about love. Republican Jesus ™ also hates and, boy, does he hate!
Republican Jesus ™ hates the poor. This is the flip side of “prosperity theology”. If God rewards the faithful with riches, than the poor are obviously NOT of the faith and deserve what they get. This is, in part, why conservatives hate the social safety nets of welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. Those (and by “those” I mean those) people don’t worship Republican Jesus ™ and are unworthy of being helped. Besides if you feed them, they’ll just breed!

Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer of South Carolina actually said that. And he meant it.

Republican Jesus ™ hates The Gay. They’re sinners, after all. It says so right there in the Bible next to the part about shellfish being an abomination. Nothing demonstrates the compassionate conservatives’ dedication to the teachings of Republican Jesus ™ like blocking legislation for same sex marriage and calling homosexuals pedophiles while enjoying a nice shrimp cocktail before a delicious lobster dinner.
Also, Republican Jesus ™ gave us AIDS, and STDs in general, as punishment for homosexuality. Of course, this ignores the fact that lesbians (a well-known subset of homosexuality) have the lowest rate of STDs, including AIDS, among all adult population groups. So as far as punishment goes, half of the “sinners” are better off than the rest of us, statistically speaking. Maybe Republican Jesus ™ likes him some girl on girl action?
Republican Jesus ™ hates Muslims. Muslims are scary because some of them do bad things to innocent people. That makes them all evil terrorists. This is not to be confused with White Christian Militia types who blow up abortion clinics or plot political assassinations in Republican Jesus’ ™ name. Those people are martyrs and heroes. Or they were crazy lone wolves having nothing to do with Republican Jesus ™. It depends on which channel you’re interviewing on, Fox or MSNBC.
Republican Jesus ™ totally hates Liberals. Liberals are the pawns of Satan George Soros trying to destroy the greatest country ever made on this 6000 year old planet (conservative moderates are almost as bad and must be expunged!). Compromising with a Liberal is a terrible sin in the eyes of Republican Jesus ™ and must not be tolerated.
Finally, Republican Jesus ™ hates science. With a passion bordering on obsession. And that’s the topic of my next ivory tower snobby liberal thesis: “Why DO conservatives hate science so much?” Or “How I learned not to learn and trust my beer gut instead.”
Edited by Sherri Yarbrough
Feel free to tell me what a terrible person I am on Facebook, at my home blog or follow me on Twitter @FilthyLbrlScum
Images from http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/

Boehner comes up with a new explanation for why Republicans shut down the government

House Speaker John Boehner at a press conference on Friday morning, answering a question about what it will take for Republicans to reopen the government: Listen, the issue right now is the continuing resolution to open the government, and all we're asking for is for Harry Reid to appoint conferees so we can sit down and have a conversation about bringing fairness to the American people and getting government open. That was Boehner's entire answer, from start to finish. To end this shutdown, all he wants is for Senate Democrats to agree to sit down and negotiate a budget with him. Almost sounds reasonable, right? Problem is, on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered to do exactly what Boehner said he wanted—to appoint conferees to a House-Senate conference committee to resolve budget differences between the two chambers—but Boehner said no anyway. Why did Boehner say no? Because Reid attached one condition to his offer: The government would have to reopen during the negotiations. Boehner couldn't live with that, so he said no. In other words, when John Boehner says the only thing Republicans want is for Senate Democrats to agree to negotiations, he's not telling the truth. What he wants is for Senate Democrats (and President Obama) to agree to negotiate while House Republicans have a metaphorical gun to the country's head. And the fact that he can't come up with an honest way of articulating that position is a pretty clear indicator that even he knows just how weak it really is. Originally posted to The Jed Report on Fri Oct 04, 2013 at 09:08 AM PDT. Also republished by Daily Kos. House Speaker John Boehner at a press conference on Friday morning, answering a question about what it will take for Republicans to reopen the government:

Listen, the issue right now is the continuing resolution to open the government, and all we're asking for is for Harry Reid to appoint conferees so we can sit down and have a conversation about bringing fairness to the American people and getting government open.

That was Boehner's entire answer, from start to finish. To end this shutdown, all he wants is for Senate Democrats to agree to sit down and negotiate a budget with him. Almost sounds reasonable, right? Problem is, on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offered to do exactly what Boehner said he wanted—to appoint conferees to a House-Senate conference committee to resolve budget differences between the two chambers—but Boehner said no anyway.
Why did Boehner say no? Because Reid attached one condition to his offer: The government would have to reopen during the negotiations. Boehner couldn't live with that, so he said no.
In other words, when John Boehner says the only thing Republicans want is for Senate Democrats to agree to negotiations, he's not telling the truth. What he wants is for Senate Democrats (and President Obama) to agree to negotiate while House Republicans have a metaphorical gun to the country's head. And the fact that he can't come up with an honest way of articulating that position is a pretty clear indicator that even he knows just how weak it really is.

Originally posted to The Jed Report on Fri Oct 04, 2013 at 09:08 AM PDT.

Also republished by Daily Kos.

No Weapons, Anti-Government Items In Stamford Condo Of Woman Killed In Washington Chase

Family, neighbors search for answers; authorities look for clues, examine mental-health questions

By MATTHEW KAUFFMAN, JENNY WILSON And EDMUND H. MAHONY, mkauffman@courant.com

11:43 a.m. EDT, October 4, 2013

STAMFORD —Federal and local law enforcement officers who searched Miriam Carey's condominium hours after the dental hygienist was shot and killed near the U.S. Capitol found no weapons or any evidence that she was angry with the government, sources have told the Courant.
But new evidence emerged Friday suggesting the 34-year-old mother had battled mental-health issues, including reports that authorities found psychiatric medication in the home and that the father of her child had contacted police a year ago, fearing Carey had become delusional and might endanger their baby. Family members also told news outlets that Carey suffered postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter 18 months ago.
Careywas the woman behind the wheel of the black Infiniti coupe with Connecticut license plates that tried to pass an outer security checkpoint at the White House. After police swarmed the car, Carey led authorities on a chase through central Washington and died after being shot near the Capitol. A child in the car with her was not injured, officials said.

Video shows the car speeding away from police during a chase that went for about 1.5 miles, and led to a lockdown of the Capitol and sent tourists scrambling for cover. Shots were fired by police in at least two locations during the pursuit, Washington Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said.

Authorities Friday continued to piece together the incident, looking for clues as to why Carey traveled hundreds of miles to Washington and why she attempted to get through the checkpoint.
Carey's sister, Amy Carey, a nurse in Brooklyn, N.Y., was incredulous when she was reached Thursday afternoon by the Washington Post and told what had happened outside the Capitol.
"That's impossible. She works, she holds a job," said Amy Carey, who confirmed that her sister drove a black car. She said she knew of nothing that would bring her sister to Washington. "She wouldn't be in D.C. She was just in Connecticut two days ago, I spoke to her. ... I don't know what's happening. I can't answer any more."
But Carey's mother, Idella Carey, told ABC News that her daughter had mental-health issues. "She had postpartum depression after having the baby," Idella Carey told the network. "A few months later, she got sick. She was depressed. She was hospitalized."
In Stamford, police entered the Woodside Green Condominiums complex, where Carey lived, Thursday evening, and residents, who told to leave, said police told them the investigation was connected to the Capitol shooting. Residents said Hazardous-materials teams also were there.
A robot searching for bombs made a sweep through the unit Thursday night before FBI and Stamford police entered. Officers found a room with a baby's crib and toys. There were baby bottles in the kitchen.
The roads in the area re-opened by 7:30 a.m. Friday, and police had left the condo by 9:30 a.m.
Neighbors said they had seen Carey in passing. They said she was polite and smiled at them.
A next-door neighbor said she and Carey exchanged pleasantries. Carey was excited about her new baby, she said, and was never aggressive. She had seen her outside with the baby, picnicking, she said.
Another resident said he has seen Carey speeding through the parking lot.
Carey's motive was not known late Thursday. Agents from FBI New Haven division were assisting with the investigation in Stamford, an FBI spokesman said.
Miriam Iris Carey was born in August 1979, most likely in New York state, where her Social Security number was assigned not long after.
She appeared to live most of her adult life in Brooklyn, N.Y., and became a registered dental hygienist in 2002 after receiving a bachelor's degree in health sciences.
By 2009, she had moved to Stamford, living at Woodside Green, a sprawling complex of 212 one- and two-bedroom units by Rippowam River off busy Washington Boulevard and near Scalzi Park north of I-95. She paid $242,000 for her unit.
In September 2009, she became a licensed dental hygienist in Connecticut. By 2011, she had formed a home-based business, Experienced Dental Placements, which appeared to operate as a temporary employment firm.
Carey worked at some point at Hamden-based Advanced Periodontics. The company's website states that Carey has a "delightful bedside manner." A person who answered the phone at the practice Friday said the company had no comment.
She has no criminal record in Connecticut and no pending criminal actions. In 2012, the condominium association filed suit against her, but it was withdrawn less than two months later following "discussion of the parties on their own," according to court records.
Several residents of Woodside Green said they did not know Carey personally, but recognized her, her baby and her car, a black Infiniti.
"I recognized the car, not the woman, the car," said Wendy Frolick, 64, who lives in a nearby building. "Beautiful car. She always keeps it nice and shiny. And she always parked on the end, the very end," she said, pointing to a parking lot near the building police were searching.
Carey's behavior until Thursday, Frolick said, was "totally normal."
When the FBI and Secret Service showed up late Thursday afternoon, some residents of the complex were asked to evacuate, including Angela Corrente, 37, who lived in the same building as Carey.
Corrente said she didn't know Carey, but saw her frequently. They would let each other in and out of the building, she said. She recalled that the last time she saw Carey was about a week ago. "She had a baby," Corrente said. "She's pretty quiet. Pretty much kept to herself."
Corrente said that when she arrived home from her job in Stamford authorities allowed her to take some belongings but told her to leave the building. "They said it could take a couple of hours or overnight," she said.
The chase began near the White House and ended near the Capitol, where Congress was in session, trying to find a solution to a budget standoff that partially shut down the government.
Officials said the vehicle struck a security barrier at 15th and Pennsylvania Avenue, near the White House. Police chased the vehicle to 2nd Street and Constitution Avenue, near the Capitol, where Carey was killed.
Sen. Chris Murphy's staff members were working in the Hart Senate Office Building when they heard gunfire.
"We heard the shots," said Ben Marter, Murphy's chief spokesman. "It happened right outside our office. We're on the third floor of the Hart Building. We're right around the corner from Constitution [Avenue], where the car ended up.''
Staff members jumped up and looked out the windows, where they could see Capitol Police.
"It was that close. We were right there," Marter said. "It was hard to tell because there's construction going on between Hart and the Supreme Court. We initially thought it was construction noise because it was boom! boom! boom! in rapid succession."
Murphy was not in his office.
"The senator was just off the Senate floor in the cloakroom, right outside the Senate floor." Marter said. "They told the members they were in lockdown, so he stayed in the Senate chamber.'"
After attending training drills, Murphy's staff was prepared.
"The staff here all gathered together in the middle of the office,'' Marter said. "There was an instantaneous alert system. All of our cellphones flashed an instant message. Everybody gets the same alert.''
At the time of the shooting, there were about nine staffers in Murphy's office.
"We were going about our business,'' Marter said. "The senator had been on the floor speaking ... He was due to come back. He stayed in the Senate chamber.''
They received a "shelter in place order — close all the blinds, lock all the doors and gather in the innermost place in the office,'' he said.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said the Senate went into recess shortly after word of the shooting spread.
"I was on the floor of the Senate at the time, speaking with a number of my colleagues, when one of the senators rushed into the chamber and said there has been a shooting ... a Capitol policeman has been injured.''
"We were barred from going back to our office,'' he said. "Everyone in the office was told to stay away from the windows. ... All the offices were locked down. No one could leave their individual offices.''
Blumenthal said that his staff members did not hear the gunshots.
"It seems to be a very isolated incident involving one person who seems to have been extremely troubled, acting in an extraordinarily bizarre, even deranged matter, raising the possibility of mental illness,'' Blumenthal said.
"The lockdown is over and we are back to relative normalcy,'' he said. "The folks in our office were pretty shaken. We have allowed our interns to go home. We've encouraged them to talk to friends or relatives.''
Rep. Joseph Courtney, D-2nd District, did not hear the shots because he was in his office on the other end of the Capitol complex.
"I was in the Rayburn Building on the other side of the campus,'' Courtney said. "We had just had a delegation conference call on Sikorsky with the undersecretary of defense when the squawk box blared out the warning that there had been a shooting. We had people outside the office and they came scurrying in.''
He added: "This place is on edge right now. We had a shooting at the Navy Yard, which is really close to the Capitol. And tensions are high with the shutdown.''
Prompted by the partial shutdown of the federal government that was into its third day, fewer people are in the Capitol complex.
"In general, the population is lower,'' Courtney said. "The House office buildings, the cafeterias, some of the offices with civilian federal employees are shuttered. The number of people is less than a regular business day, but the House is in session. It's still crowded around here. Even though the tourists are being denied access to the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, it's still crowded.''
After the lockdown was lifted, the House went back into session as if nothing had happened outside.
Courant Reporters Daniela Altimari, Christopher Keating, Christine Dempsey and Kelly Glista contributed to this story.

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