A couple or three dozen Congresspeople – and the House Speaker – have shut down the federal government because they object to PPACA.  And the shutdown may well extend to a refusal to raise the debt ceiling.  The economic impact is significant:

• The economy is losing $300 million a day.
• A three-week shutdown will decrease GDP by almost 1%, this in an economy that has struggled to keep growth at 2%.
• 2 million federal workers’ paychecks are delayed; 800,000 may never get paid.  They have mortgages, tuition payments, credit card bills to pay.

That’s the economic picture; the effects on individuals are diverse, but the longer this goes on, the more painful it will become.

I’d suggest there’s a longer-term problem, one that will have an unquantifiable but nevertheless profound negative impact on the US; the vilification of federal government employees by politicians and pundits who denigrate those workers and the work they do.

After three years of no raises, continued demonization by strident and powerful talking heads and politicians, after being told they are the problem, the morale of the average government employee has got to be pretty low.  These are the people who put out fires, keep airplanes from hitting each other, ensure our food is safe, pay our parent’s Social Security and Medicare bills, lock up bad guys, prevent Iran from funneling money to their nuclear program.

Sure, some are pretty unproductive, but most work hard, are proud of what they do, and do it well.  

I can’t see how the ongoing “they are the enemy” meme helps our country.  Sure, it makes for great theater, but who would want to take a job where you’re constantly told you are lazy, overpaid, feckless, and a leech?

I may be biased as I have quite a bit of experience with federal workers; my Dad was in the CIA and its predecessor organization for 25 years; my Mom worked for the Agency – and managed fingerprint files for the FBI during WW II. Both were very proud of the work they did, did it very well, and made a difference. My aunt was responsible for all Navy payroll for a decade; and woe to anyone who screwed up any of “her boys'” paychecks.  Other family members are in federal law enforcement, and I cannot begin to describe the sacrifice we have paid for that commitment.

It angers and saddens me to see and hear the derisive, uninformed, and flat out wrong comments by the Bachmans and Issas of the world.  But more importantly, it shows that they really don’t understand, or perhaps don’t care, that their grand-standing will do lasting, and real damage to our country.  

If we can’t attract hard-working, intelligent, competent people to work in public service, we’re screwed.

And we have no one to blame but ourselves.

In Cruz’ 21 hour infomercial he read Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, ostensibly to his daughters.

Cruz would have been better served to learn Seuss’ lessons himself.

His fauxlibuster was ostensibly driven by his objection to health reform and desire to eliminate funding for PPACA. 

A.  that’s not going to happen.  and

B.  the author of Green Eggs and Ham was a major supporter of health research and reform

Cruz’ choice of Suess books heaps irony on irony; Green Eggs and Ham is about trying new things, being open-minded, embracing change.

And the real Dr Seuss, Ted Geisel, was not only an unabashed liberal, he and his wife were major supporters of health research and reform.  

Dartmouth College’s medical school – now named for the couple, is a leading force in understanding health care and developing both clinical and management solutions.

“The Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth strives to improve the lives of the people it serves—students, patients, and local and global communities—and to live out the Dartmouth ethos that “the world’s troubles are your troubles.”

The School includes the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the first center to comprehensively examine variations in health care costs in U.S. medical practice (The Dartmouth Atlas).

Let’s hope Cruz’ daughters take a lesson from Suess, and not from dad.

The actions of some of Obamacare’s opponents are outrageous, immoral, abhorrent, revolting.  And very revealing.

The latest plunge into the cesspool is courtesy of the Koch Brothers; if you haven’t seen Creepy Uncle Same, don’t. You’ve been warned.

The disgusting ad is the latest in a series of outright lies and complete fabrications perpetrated by Koch and their fellow cesspool-dwellers on the wingnut right.  Amazingly, some of their pundits seem to think this is acceptable behavior, that using a video of Uncle Sam preparing to rape a young woman is funny, appropriate, acceptable.

It is not, absolutely not.

Leave aside the minor matter that the ad is complete bullshit, and the pathological minds that would fund, create, applaud such an ad are pathetically twisted people.

Instead, ask yourself why they’d descend to such depths in an attempt to scare young people away from enrolling in health insurance.

First, it’s just stupid.  Of course everyone should have health insurance.

Second, it goes directly against a fundamental conservative principle – personal responsibility.  If young immortals don’t have insurance – for whatever reason – when they get sick or hurt you and I end up paying for them.  That’s wrong.

Third, if Obamacare/PPACA is so bad, so fundamentally flawed, so bound to fail, why do opponents have to resort to rape scares? After all, it is based on principles laid out by the Heritage Foundation, a central pillar of the conservative movement.

And therein lies the core issue.  I posit the following.

For reasons we’ve discussed here at great length, PPACA won’t “fail”, simply because it fixes the core problem with the current insurance market – Private insurers will not insure people who are likely to have health problems at anything close to affordable rates.  And they shouldn’t. The “solutions” proposed by opponents are just laughable. The basic elements of the GOP’s approach – buying insurance across state lines, tort reform, meaningless tax credits, a paltry high-risk insurance pool – do nothing to address that core problem.

When it does succeed, it will blow a very large hole in what passes for current ultra-conservative theology; government is completely incompetent.

That scares the pants off Koch and their allies, the fear that personal experiences with a government-run program will be generally pretty positive; that things will work pretty well.

Oh, the horrors.

The young woman in Koch’s Creepy ad is a metaphor for the brothers’ own reaction to Obamacare; it is going to work pretty well, people will like it, and they will then become more favorably disposed to more activist public policy.