The Daily Parker

Day 5. Today, though, Congress did something right:

With the partial shutdown entering its fifth day, the GOP-run House passed a bill Saturday that would make sure the furloughed workers get paid for not working. The White House backs the bill and the Senate was expected to OK it, too, but the timing was unclear.

The 407-0 vote in the House was uniquely bipartisan, even as lawmakers continued their partisan rhetoric.

The White House has said President Obama will sign the bill.

Of course, "back pay" still means they won't get paid until John Boehner chooses the country over his job, but hey.

Oh, and there's this, too. Good thing I'm not doing anything like putting my house on the market.

Thirty Republicans are doing this. Thirty of them.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones puts the shutdown in 10 sentences:

3. Democrats in the Senate have been begging the House to negotiate over the budget for the past six months, but Republicans have refused.

4. That's because Republicans wanted to wait until they had either a government shutdown or a debt ceiling breach as leverage, something they've been very clear about all along.

He sums up: "This whole dispute is about the Republican Party fighting to make sure the working poor don't have access to affordable health care."

In other bad news about numeric things, Monday was the official start of Anno Catuli 05, 68, 105. Someday...and that day may never come...it'll be AC 0, 0, 0. Someday.

They want to make it even harder for millions of impoverished Americans to get health care:

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”

These are the principles upon which the Republican Party have shut down the U.S. government.

It's day three of the stupidest political event of the past 20 years. Here are some reactions.

The Atlantic's Jon Judis likens it to Weimar Germany:

I wouldn’t expect the current crisis, which was precipitated by the descendants of Calhoun, to result in a civil war. The civil war, as Marx once wrote, was a revolutionary clash that pitted one mode of production against another. Nothing so momentous is at stake today. It also pitted one region against another, and it was fought with rifles and men on horseback. The largest effect is likely to be continued dysfunction in Washington, which if it continues over a decade or so, will threaten economic growth and America’s standing in the world, undermine social programs like the Affordable Care Act, and probably encourage more radical movements on the right and the left. Think of Italy, Greece, or Weimar Germany. Or think about what the United States would have been like if World War II had not occurred, and if Europe, the United States, and Japan had failed to pull themselves out of the Great Depression.

AVWeb points out that the shutdown has already suspended an aviation accident investigation, and could disrupt more:

Although air traffic controllers remain on the job, 3,000 support workers in the ATC system have been furloughed, says Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. The furloughs will delay the opening of a new runway at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and will delay the approval of safety-related equipment modifications to aircraft. "It is unacceptable that thousands of our aviation safety professionals have been forced to stay home due to partisan posturing in Congress," Rinaldi said. The NTSB also was immediately affected, as the go-team assigned to investigate the fatal Citation crash in Santa Monica was sent home on Tuesday.

The wreckage of the CJ2 will be stored in a hangar until investigators can return to continue their work, officials said. The safety board's usually-busy Twitter feed has been silent since Monday, and no updates have been posted to the agency's website. If the shutdown continues, it also may delay certification of Boeing's newest version of the Dreamliner, the stretched 787-9.

The shutdown will also delay the opening of O'Hare's Runway 10C-28C, which had been scheduled for later this month.

New York's Jon Chait makes the analogy to William Macy's character in Fargo, who aggressively stumbled into ruin:

Okay, first of all, is “Hostage Taking 101” an actual course of study taught to members of the Bush administration? Even if this is a metaphor, it seems like a problematic model for governance. Also, Thiessen argues that Obama will have to give concessions to avoid a debt breach because he cares about the loss of millions of jobs. That seems to imply that Republicans don’t care. After all, if Republicans cared just as much, Obama could be threatening to veto the debt-ceiling hike if Republicans didn’t give him concessions.

Boehner does not seem to share his party’s sociopathic embrace of hostage tactics. Boehner resembles William H. Macy’s character in Fargo, who concocts a simple plan to have his wife kidnapped and skim the proceeds, failing to think a step forward about what happens once she’s actually seized by violent criminals. He doesn’t intend for her to be harmed, but also has no ability to control the plan once he’s set it in motion. In the end, Boehner's Speakership is likely to end up in the wood chipper, anyway.

And finally, a tweet by Judd Legum that sums it up nicely:

Can I burn down your house?

No

Garage?

No

Let's talk about what I can burn down.

No

YOU AREN'T COMPROMISING

Brilliant.

Just a reminder: John Boehner can end the government shutdown any time he wants to. No, really:

All Boehner has to do is bring a “clean” continuing resolution to the House floor -- that is, a bill to fund the government without any strings attached -- and give it a vote. Most, if not all, Democrats would vote for it, and enough Republicans are publicly now on board to pass it. The Huffington Post has been keeping a running tally of which Republicans have said they support doing this. Privately, more GOP lawmakers have indicated they would as well.

So why won't he? One theory, from the right:

A clean CR has never been an option. Peter King of New York and his allies may want one, but the leadership privately believes it’d almost certainly raise tensions within the ranks and cripple their negotiating position.

Instead, the leadership is digging in for an extended impasse with Senate Democrats. Based on my latest conversations with insiders, their plan isn’t to eventually whip Republicans toward a clean CR and back down after a few days of messaging the shutdown, as some have believed; it’s to keep fighting, and, in the process, preserve the House GOP’s fragile unity — and maybe, if they’re lucky, win a concession from Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

But that unity, more than anything, is critical for Boehner, especially as the debt limit nears. Per his allies, his fear is, if he brings up a clean CR, he’d be seen as conceding to Reid, who’s seen as the villain of villains within the House GOP. Thirty to forty conservatives would likely revolt against such a maneuver, and so would their backers in the conservative movement. In the press, he’d likely be cheered for a profile in courage; within the House, the decision would be seen by his critics on the right as a betrayal of the highest order. There is nothing they detest more than the idea of caving, and Boehner knows that.

In other words, they're high-schoolers at best.

At least not all of the shutdown's unintended consequences were bad.

Sullivan has a scathing piece about the Republicans shutting down the government again. And closer to home, apparently Chicago has phantom El trains that drive themselves right into other trains.

But yesterday's Atlantic Cities piece on bike-share etiquette is much more enjoyable to think about than either of those:

The central ethos is built into the name. "The whole point of it is it’s bike share, it’s not bike rental," says Kim Reynolds, the office and administrative manager in Washington for Alta Bicycle Share, which operates Capital Bikeshare. In Chicago, the network is called Divvy, which literally means "to divide and share." In Minneapolis and St. Paul, their system is called Nice Ride, a play on the notion that bike-share requires a certain quality that Minnesotans in particular possess.

Bad behavior is technically harder to achieve on a bike. You can’t leave trash in it. The bikes themselves are relatively difficult to damage. And penalties for hogging them are built into the price structure: So you want to take that bike and lock it up outside your office all day? That’s fine. You’ll pay $75 or so in most cities for the right. (Here’s how nice they are in Minnesota: If you do this without understanding the system with Nice Ride, customer service will call you up, gently explain they want their bike back, forgive you, and refund the charge the first time.)

See? Much more pleasant than the rest of the day's news. Or giant, deadly hornets. Better than those, too.

Baseball in Chicago ended yesterday as both the Cubs and the other team lost to whomever they were playing. The Cubs ended the season 66-96; the South Siders, 63-99. Here's the miserable Cubs season in a single graph:

So I was shocked to find gambling in this establishment Dale Sveum got fired:

Sveum's dismissal comes 13 days after team president Theo Epstein declined to give Sveum, 49, a vote of confidence despite saying there were "no alarm bells to ring" regarding the manager. Epstein said Sveum's future was part of the annual process of evaluations throughout the organization and that the manager wasn’t to be judged on wins and losses.

However, it was apparent that Epstein and his staff were disappointed with other areas in which Sveum was to be evaluated, such as the development of young players, in-game decision-making, use of the 25-man roster, the ability to “create a culture of accountability, hard work and preparation, and the ability to develop a strong trust with his players.”

In his defense, three of the five teams in the division clinched playoff berths. So maybe it wasn't that the Cubs sucked ass this year. Maybe they just had a tough division.

Nah. They sucked ass. And Sveum's out on his.

I was going to post about the Cubs, who just ended the 2013 season a few hours ago, but then I saw James Fallows' clear and concise takedown of the pernicious notion that the impending shutdown of the U.S. Government is anything other than a Republican Party failure:

In short, we have a faction making historically unprecedented demands -- give us everything, or we stop the government and potentially renege on the national debt. And it is doing so less than a year after its party lost the presidency, lost the Senate (and lost ground there), and held onto the House in part because of rotten-borough distortions.

You can call this a lot of things, but "gridlock" should not be one of them. And you can fault many aspects of the President's response -- when it comes to debt-default, I think he has to stick to the "no negotiations with terrorists" hard line. But you shouldn't pretend that if he been more "reasonable" or charming he could placate a group whose goal is the undoing of his time in office.

We'll see what happens tomorrow. And even if we avoid a government shutdown Tuesday, the Treasury's borrowing authority will run out mid-month unless the House gets itself in order. Fun times, fun times.

New York magazine's Ann Friedman explains why she did:

New York is increasingly a city for people who are already on top, not for those looking to establish themselves. I've always been partial to the friendly guy who doesn’t know how hot he really is (Chicago) or the surprisingly intelligent, sexy stoner (Los Angeles) as opposed to the dude who thinks he’s top of the list, king of the hill, A-number-one.

In an excerpt from Goodbye to All That adapted for BuzzFeed, Ruth Curry describes the heady infatuation with New York that I never managed to feel: “The city lent itself especially well to a mental configuration in which you were an extra in an artsy, high-budget movie and saw everything as if through a camera on a set.” Part of that infatuation is a willingness to consider New York from a cinematic distance, overlooking the city’s many irritants except insofar as they add grit and drama to your story. This seems like the general approach of many New York evangelists, who complain vigorously about little things like subway hardships and bedbug plagues, and then post Instagram photos of the skyline at sunset. A not-insignificant number of the vehement New York lovers I know — especially the young twentysomethings — are actually pretty unhappy day to day. I picture the prom king’s girlfriend sitting near him at the party, ignored but still kind of proud to be in the room and on his arm — and incredibly defensive should you suggest she break up with him for someone who dotes on her more. When I describe my West Coast existence (sunshine! avocados! etc.) to some New Yorkers, they acknowledge that they really like California, too, but could never move there because they’d get too “soft.” At first this confused me, but after hearing it a few times, I’ve come to believe that a lot of people equate comfort with complacency, calmness with laziness. If you’re happy, you’re not working hard enough. You’ve stopped striving.

For my part, I moved back to Chicago after three years because I didn't want to hate New York. It worked. I still love New York, but in the way a person can love an ex: I keep up with what she's doing, and we have coffee every so often, but that's about it.

Now 10 days into the Divvy experiment, I have some data. Since receiving my Divvy key on the 17th, I've taken 17 Divvy trips of between 6 and 46 minutes. (The 46 minutes included waiting 15 minutes at a station for a space to open up.)

A Divvy subscription costs $75 per year. The 17 trips I've taken just the past two weeks would have cost $38.25 on public transit. Or, since my average trip is around 14 minutes, it could be the equivalent of about $73-80 in cab fares.

Obviously, I've taken Divvy instead of walking a couple of times. And just as obviously, I wouldn't have taken cabs on most of those occasions as one can reasonably say that any weather appropriate for biking is also fine for waiting for a bus or train.

The biggest value, however, comes from my morning commute. On Divvy, it's 25 minutes door to door. On the LaSalle bus (the second-fastest way) it takes 45 minutes. That gives me 20 extra minutes in my day, which at my billing rate more than makes up for the annual fee.

Divvy is absolutely brilliant. I'm absolutely going to try the local equivalents next time I visit London or New York. Or other cities with similar systems: Montreal Bixi (the first in North America), Paris Velib' (the largest public bike share outside China), or someday Melbourne (helmet vending machines available as well).