So now the government is shut down
 

And what is it that Republicans want in order to not shut down government again?

A balanced budget amendment
Approving Keystone XL
Eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood
Medicare privatization
Tax reform, as outlined by Paul Ryan
The REINS Act, which would require Congress to approve significant federal regulations
Means-testing Social Security
Defunding Obamacare
Allowing employers to eliminate insurance coverage for birth control
An expansion of off-shore drilling
Preserving all the Bush tax cuts
“Trillions” in budget cuts
Slashing funding for food stamps
Protecting mountaintop strip mining
Stripping the EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases
Loosening regulation on coal ash
Delaying Obamacare implementation by one year
Repealing a tax on medical devices
Eliminating Social Service Block Grants
Expanding drilling on federal lands
Restricting the child tax credit

*These are the issues they want to address apparently

Yo, I aint gonna sit here and give some academic feminist objection to all this but... Christ in BED! This shit actually reads like a god damned anti-woman thing. For fucking serious. Why is it that a large chunk of this seems to be centered around how a woman fucks and how she deals with those consequences and now the fucking government has been shut down and apparently, this is fucking with things like food assistance programs such as WIC... which SPOILER ALERT!!!! is primarily composed of women with children. Fuck... FUCK! I wish to fuck I had a Xanax right about now. I'd go full stick if I could.

The government is shut down? Cause I'm still at work wasting a lot of money today.

Fuck that.
And you're probably right.

(TW Propaganda with r@pey overtones) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbMaQNsgW0Q

If you're willing to get shot for your country, tough shit, get to work!

But seriously, they want more plebes to work for less over more hours in shittier conditions. Come to Texas and you'll see that shit in full force. The state government doesn't run this place, the fucking corporations do and would gladly pay less then minimum wage if they could get away with it (and do I might add, if you wait or bus tables.) People who live in the areas being drilled for natural gas have to sign waivers that they can't reveal what's happened to their drinking water, pregnant women are highly encouraged not to eat seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, you can be fired for little to no reason, not to mention even if you work in a highly demanding field you can get shit canned just for joining a union. Oh, and do you wanna travel to another city? You can take the clogged up highway, or you can pay a toll tax to drive on a separate highway that your taxes funded after going thirty minutes out of your way; because there's next to zero rail lines.

While the corporations didn't get to buy the last election, and actually lost several seats in the process, they're still trying to implement this shit nationwide. Just look at the circus in Austin earlier this summer, even when people were spilling into the halls to tell the state reps not to pass that law, they still did it anyway, and fuck you if you get pregnant.

I motion we bring back the guillotine and use it on not only the corporate assholes who truly run the U.S., but every asshole in DC that's been bought out, regardless of party affiliation or office placement. Fuck those people.

The president made sure that the military didn't go through the same issues. What they've done is put roughly 800,000 "non-essential" employees on some kind of weird suspension of work and may get paid backpay for the trouble once this shit sorts itself out.

Ironically enough, one of the things hit the hardest it seems is food benefits such as WIC. Cause I guess fuck women and children, you know?

Furlough, they call it.

To emphasize the crazy, they want these things in exchange for letting the government be open for six weeks, or approximately a month and a half.

As the wise Rob DenBleyker said, I can sympathize with House Republicans because once my mom wouldn’t let me get candy at the store, and then I burned down the whole city.

Yeah they keep the service members paid but the people who make up our support staff are getting furloughed. Jake's teaching team was already stretched thin, god only knows what they are going to do now. Thankfully his class is so close to the end that the teachers are mainly there to just guide discussions, but I honestly don't know what this will do to classes earlier in the program.

Another problem that is oh so fun is that whole departments are shutting down. Jake should be able to get an Associates in Mandarin but the department he has to go through is closed, if it doesn't reopen before we leave here he may not be able to get that degree. We also can't access his orders because the website that he is supposed to access them on is down so we don't know what his orders are. We know where he will be going and what his job will be but we are only guessing what his report date will be and we can't start paperwork for the move without the actual orders (and the office that processes the move has a bunch of people on furlough so even if we had the orders it would take longer than normal for them to be processed).

I could keep ranting about stuff pertaining directly to us and I could go off on a whole rant about how fucking costly this shit is and the utter shame our government should feel for closing our parks and monuments but I don't have the energy.

Hits ya'll a lot harder then me. For the moment, the only thing that is directly effecting me is that this course I'm in is kind of iffy because it limits the cadre's choices in what firing ranges they can use, so our training might be a little rushed.

Yeah, we got especially hard hit because all of the support staff, from the teachers to admin to medical, here is civilians so everything is either slow as molasses or just not happening. On top of offices not being open there are also tons of people here doing fuck all because the PCS office is closed so even the people who are done aren't going anywhere (we may also be here longer than expected even if things are back open by then because of the backlog that is quickly building, hopefully our apartment complex will let us extend out lease if that happens) and new classes aren't starting because of teachers being furloughed (thankfully Jake's teaching team is just having to cut back on things like having more than one teacher for what is basically study hall).

Ugh you just reminded me that the mental health clinic is all civilians.

My course is canceled because of the shut down.

That sucks V, I'm sorry

Me too. It's slight and inconsequential in terms of career progression, though it was really good to learn. The sheer trigger time I got from just the first 40 hours was phenomenal in terms of what I can do, now.

I heard about this happening. As I understand it, Obama's pissed off at the House of Representatives for pulling this shit.
Excuse my language, but fucking God damned Republicans. I know I'm from Scotland and none of this really affects me personally, but God dammit I have family over there and what affects them affects me.

I honest to Gods would have thought some Americans would LIKE the idea of Obamacare, but apparently not. Because no one wants to save lives, oh no. Screw paying for mammograms and smears and other life saving procedures like abortions. Screw paying for birth control so that girls don't have to worry about condoms splitting.
Screw paying for someone's important heart surgery so they won't die in three years.
That's the whole impression I'm getting from the republicans and their supporters. If you can't pay, you die.
And here was me thinking America was a Democracy. Sure, it's a Democracy, but only if you have money.

Sorry for the rant. I just hate how some people can be so greedy that they'd rather people died than gave them healthcare for free.

All Obamacare is though that everyone has to have insurance. If a surgery or treatment is expensive, and your insurance doesn't cover it 100%, you're still fucked if you can't afford the copay. Might be better than nothing at all, but its not universal health care.

It's more than that. Part of the ACA also ensures that an insurance company can't just drop you if you get a lifelong condition (i.e. diabetes) nor can you be denied if you already have a pre-existing condition.

However, here's the reality of the politics in the U.S. The right wingers have done everything they can to try to implement their way of government, even when they've slowly been losing supporters across the country. How is that possible you may ask? It's simple, really.

As long as they hold the majority of seats within a state senate while in office they can redraw the maps to fit their ideological bent. In fact, several politicians have openly admitted to doing just that. Don't believe me? Check out the state of Texas.

Source --->http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/10/texas...just-politics/

While they claim it's not about race, I call bullshit. Where I live, Hispanics account for +/- 55% of the population, African Americans +/- 8%. (Source ---> http://www.texas-demographics.com/be...y-demographics) Yet the county was carved up in the recent redistricting for voting. You can practically see who lives where when looking at the most recent voting district maps. The county I live in is in the lower left. The other smaller maps on the sides demonstrate the other major metropolitan areas.

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/...sional-map.jpg

I was told that Obamacare was essentially the same as the NHS over here, that Obama loved the way we did things and decided to copy it.
Perhaps my source was mistaken.

Nope. It isn't actually health care, it's changes to the laws concerning health insurance (so people can't get disqualified for preexisting conditions, stuff like that) and putting all insurance policies in one place so that people can (when things are working properly) easily sort through and find what policy works for them, essentially putting insurance providers in direct competition with each other, which is the main reason why prices are going down.

So a few soldiers died in Afghanistan during the shutdown. Guess if the government paid their families their life insurance.