October 2013 Roundup: Acts of Bloggery in the Shutdown’s Wake
My picks for the blogosphere’s most valuable insights into the shutdown insanity:
Moral lens:
The 8 immoral ways the government shutdown is hurting the needy | On Faith – the shutdown inflicted pain on people already struggling and making due on government aid amidst the post-2008 “economic realignment,” cutting or threatening to cut already weakened social programs, though this has been badly underreported.
The Day After | Talking Philosophy – The Philosophers’ Magazine Blog – Mike LaBossiere applies the measures of philosophy to the shutdown crisis, who has the moral responsibility and perceived “moral blame?” It’s a strenuous task to be sure, but valuable.
Unexpected impacts:
Government shutdown hits comics | The Comics Beat – the government shutdown’s impacts seemed to leak into every nook and cranny of American life. Even comic books were impacted, new books delayed, stuck at the docks waiting to be cleared through customs.
Student projects interrupted by US shutdown | Nature – because of the shutdown, Siddharth Hegde’s extremophile PhD experiment at NASA Ames, after carefully nurturing and growing his extremophiles, might have died off for want of feeding since the Lab was locked up and 98% of NASA personnel were ruled non-essential and furloughed. It’s not known whether the extremophile experiment survived the extremophiles in Congress (I put the question to Hegde) but if the cell samples died he won’t be able to re-do the experiment, as his visa is only for three months.
Cartoon:
“Shutdown” by POLITICO’s Matt Wuerker
Political assessments:
In Washington and in Lansing, tea party zealots are costing us a fortune as they waste our hard-earned tax dollars | Eclectablog – “This is what happens when you elect people who hate the government to run the government.” Eclectablog’s Chris Savage chronicles the heavy economic price paid for the shutdown shenanigans that were advertised as helping ease the deficit but did the opposite.
Lessons Learned? | Official Artur Davis – in this interesting assessment by (deeply strange black ex-Democratic Congressman—7th district—from Alabama) Artur Davis, who—after losing the black vote in Alabama—has re-made himself as an advisor to Republicans on winning the black vote, he says “The haziness of wishful thinking, overshadowed by a deeper failure to appreciate that shutdown itself validates the obstructionist label, the impression of being too inflexible to govern, that so threatens the party nationally and is even starting to creep into red states like Georgia and Louisiana.” and “…conservatism has been painfully slow to distance itself from the radicalism that has surged in the party…”
Historical perspective:
The Philosopher’s Stone: A REPLY TO ANTHONY TSONTAKIS – philosophy professor Robert Paul Wolff reflects on the right-wing’s fierce opposition to the Affordable Care Act… are there core philosophical differences? Wolff doubts there are deep ideological underpinnings to the opposition, noting that “the central features of the ACA entered public discourse in America as a set of conservative Republican proposals put forward by the right-wing Heritage Foundation…”
History Unfolding: How Much of a Victory? – after the shutdown ended, historian David Kaiser tried to put the House Tea Party guys in historical context, difficult given the unprecedented events involved. “I have tentatively decided, after much thought, that perhaps the best historical analogy for the Tea Party are the Radical Republicans of the post-civil war era. I must apologize for the analogy insofar as I admire the goals of those Republicans, namely, the full enfranchisement of freed slaves, while I feel the Tea Party is trying to undo all the good that the US government has accomplished over the last century.”
And this is just a slice of the ongoing discussion. Will keep ya’ll posted.
Nick