Anyone else (possibly) getting a mandatory vacation come Tuesday?

[MrFun]

Boehner's bosses have told him to change the strategy.

[Patroklos]

I thought the spending in defense and military in United States is clearly the highest category in the budget.

Honestly it's comments like this that make it clear you are just a talking point bot. It's not even close.

[self biased]

yeah, i pretty much worship at the altar of Guynemer.

[Dinner]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/false-equivalence-that-leans-on-public-opinion-is-still-false-equivalence/280448/

A nice article on false equivalency, the error Aeson was making earlier.

[The Mad Monk]

[Aeson]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...alence/280448/

A nice article on false equivalency, the error Aeson was making earlier.

a) no
b) no
c) no

(Since you'll probably require further explanation .. no, it's not a nice article. No, I wasn't making the equivalency argument the article is addressing ... and no, I'm not in error. You are, for thinking that Democrats are blameless.)

[MRT144]

You have no idea how ridiculous this reads, do you?

You really have no idea just how much lobbying is involved in defense contracts and how these defense contractor jobs are sacred to the districts they are in. We're building weapons that will never get used to the extent that they made any sort of fiscal sense to build in the first place. Just show yourself to the door Sloww.

[The Mad Monk]

The one thing the two parties can agree on is gerrymandering so they none of the politicians ever loses an election. That's why none of them ever lose a seat.

This is a massive problem and not just because it subverts and obstructs democracy itself but also because it causes the politicians to become even more extremist even though the majority of the population doesn't want them to be extremist.

It's not mainly gerrymandering, it's mostly self-sorting.

First, there are extremely few swing districts — only one-half to one-third as many as when the last government shutdown occurred in 1996. Some of this is because of partisan gerrymandering, but more of it is because of increasingly sharp ideological divides along geographic lines: between urban and rural areas, between the North and the South, and between the coasts and the interior of the United States.

So even if Democrats make significant gains in the number of votes they receive for the House, they would flip relatively few seats because of the way those votes are distributed. Most of the additional votes would come in districts that Democrats were already assured of winning, or where they were too far behind to catch up.

Consider that, between 2010 and 2012, Democrats went from losing the average congressional district by seven percentage points to winning it by one percentage point — an eight-point swing. And yet they added only eight seats in the House, out of 435 congressional districts.

(plenty more Nate Silver goodness behind the link)

[The Mad Monk]

Republicans offer a 'clean' bill -- but not clean enough, apparently.

[PLATO]

"What we have here is a failure to Communicate"

[dannubis]

"If you can't solve it with a hammer you have an electrical problem"

[The Mad Monk]

Not entirely, some of them are still breeding.

[dannubis]

Is this still going on? Bored now.

BTW did the Belgians fix themselves?

We got fixed

[dannubis]

Not entirely, some of them are still breeding.

Breeding

Or more accurately the physical action of breeding

[MrFun]

Why did the House Republicans change a procedural rule the day before the federal government would shut down?