Midday Open Thread

• This is a great article on some Texas realities(Texas: The Conservative Dystopia ).
  

  What Rick Perry doesn’t want you to know is that the “Texas model” is, by all standards (unless you’re a billionaire), a disaster.

  Perry’s right when he says that Texas is great for business, but that’s exactly the problem. Texas’ model is only good for businesses, in particular big corporations. Everyone else is pretty much screwed.

• Really? This does not convince college kids and young adults to stay away from Obamacare. It make Republicans look like their obsession with vaginas and butts extend to infinitum.
  

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• The Crazy Party another fact base analysis by Paul Krugman.
  

  No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.

• When Karl Rove seem sensible the GOP is really in trouble.
  

  Karl Rove: The GOP’s Self-Defeating ‘Defunding’ Strategy

  It will only strengthen the president while alienating independents.

  A shutdown now would have much worse fallout than the one in 1995. Back then, seven of the government’s 13 appropriations bills had been signed into law, including the two that funded the military. So most of the government was untouched by the shutdown. Many of the unfunded agencies kept operating at a reduced level for the shutdown’s three weeks by using funds from past fiscal years.

  But this time, no appropriations bills have been signed into law, so no discretionary spending is in place for any part of the federal government. Washington won’t be able to pay military families or any other federal employee. While conscientious FBI and Border Patrol agents, prison guards, air-traffic controllers and other federal employees may keep showing up for work, they won’t get paychecks, just IOUs.

• I am not negotiating with you nuts on the debt ceiling and I mean it.
  

  A White House official said Obama told Boehner in the call that the American people had worked long and hard to dig the country out of the financial crisis and the last thing they needed was another politically motivated, self-inflicted wound.

  Obama, who would veto any bill that stripped funds from his healthcare law, hit the road too, as he has in past fiscal showdowns. “They’re not focused on you,” he said of the Republicans as he spoke at a Ford plant in Liberty, Missouri. “They’re focused on politics. They’re focused on how to mess with me.”

• Privatization of the nations security an abdication of duty of our national security agencies. Private companies maximize profits by cutting all corners they can get away with. For consumer products that is OK as consumers simply decide the level of junk they want. For the nation’s security, that puts millions in danger. When will the left get the narrative correct to rid the scourge of unfettered privatization calls.
  

  U.S. Investigations Services, the private firm now under congressional scrutiny for its background checks of federal contractors, has been sued by employees in California who claim the company enforces unrealistic timelines for security clearance investigations, according to court documents.

  An inspector general for the Office of Personnel Management told Congress in June that the office was investigating the firm, also known as USIS, in part over its vetting of famed surveillance leaker Edward Snowden. This week, multiple news outlets reported that USIS said it had also performed a 2007 background check on Aaron Alexis, who shot to death 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday. There is no evidence that USIS had bungled the vetting of Alexis.

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