Day 3 of the government shutdown is capped with a shootout on Capitol Hill, as a woman in a black sedan ran into the bollards in front of the Capitol after a chase down Pennsylvania Avenue. Apparently, she had first tried to storm the gate at the White House. The woman had a one-year old child in the car with her.
Of course, one can only speculate (which the news media so much likes to do these days) that maybe her reason was that WIC had been stopped due to the shutdown. The identified woman, Miriam Carey, seems to have been unemployed and suffering from post-partum depression. The story has been run all over the world, and is symbolic of the effects the shutdown is having on a great number of Americans, while Fox pundits call the shutdown no big deal.
This Fox op-ed piece calls it a "slimdown," even though the shutdown is costing Americans an estimated additional $12.5 million per hour, since the spending bill will eventually be passed. Of course, there have been grandstanders in front of the WWII monument bemoaning the shutdown, as if this is a great display of their patriotism in the face of their manufactured crisis.
President Obama has laid the blame squarely at House Speaker Boehner's feet, saying he has the power to call a vote at any time on the returned Senate bill, but is refusing to do so. Boehner, it seems, has caved in completely to the Tea Party Caucus, despite widespread anxiety in the GOP. At least 20 House Republicans are willing to vote for the spending bill without any cuts or delays, which would probably be enough to carry the measure.
The Tea Party, however, seems content with the shutdown, having brought government to its knees. TP caucus members seem to think they have the will of the people behind them, when polls show only 22% of Americans favored the shutdown.
The Tyranny of the Minority raises its ugly head again, in the form of a rattlesnake, which the Tea Party has adopted as its official mascot. They took the Gadsden Flag of 1775 as their emblematic banner, and Southern members have even imposed it on the Confederate flag, further signifying rebellion.
What we appear to have is a group of anarcho-fascists determined to overthrow government. They've already done their best to challenge federal government at the state level, by enacting a number of anti-Federal measures, mostly over federal gun laws. Obviously, this is a group of people that doesn't swear by the Constitution, but would have been much more comfortable with the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution, and vested authority largely in the states.
All we can do is wait and see what happens, but the frustration and anger is palpable as witnessed by this scene yesterday, which resulted in a lockdown of Congress until the woman was subdued. Fortunately, for Congress the Capitol Hill Police still works despite the shutdown.
"What’s really sick about this is that both phony political parties in the U.S. House of Representatives expressed their gratitude to the Capitol Police for their actions with a standing ovation. So here we see the entire legislative body cheering the Capitol Police gunning down an unarmed woman. This proves that these people are nuts. This is not something that deserves approval let alone a standing ovation. If these people had any sort of credibility they would be calling for an investigation into the Capitol Police as to why they needed to shoot an unarmed woman in this manner. Unfortunately in this so-called post 9/11 era this type of thuggish police action is par for the course and endorsed by lawmakers and other idiot goons in the federal government."
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Especially when the best answer the Metropolitan police dept. could come up with was, "I'm pretty confident this was not an accident."
ReplyDeleteI think you are being way too harsh on them. It's easy in retrospect to say what they should have done given what they know now. They had the car surrounded with guns pulled and she tried to run them over.
ReplyDeleteI totally sympathize with the woman, but in this instance I support the police, who are out there working WITHOUT PAY. That's the real hypocrisy of Congress. Cheering for the hard work of those they aren't even willing to pay.
I heard someone ranting last night about how government employees _should_ go without pay. How can they say that about a single mother making $25,000 a year answering phones for the American public? Or policemen defending the capitol?
I think Nebris's take, and my take as well, is that this is nothing to be proud of. There was no call for a standing ovation,
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