You Think Last Week Was Crazy?

If the shutdown wasn't absurd enough, on Saturday it hit a whole new level in Washington.  The House voted unanimously to guarantee retroactive pay for federal employees now furloughed, which means GOPers will vote to pay federal workers to do nothing with no strings attached, but they won't vote to let them do their jobs without killing or wounding the Affordable Care Act ( or whatever they're demanding today instead.)

And until Saturday about half the federal employees furloughed worked for the Defense Department, but Secretary Hagel decided that the bill the GOPers pushed through that exempted the military and employees necessary to support them meant, well, almost everybody in the Pentagon.  So he called 350,000 people back to work, and there's little likelihood the GOPers will squawk.

However, beneath the waves of absurdity and insanity is the cold reality of the shutdown: the families who aren't federal employees but are not getting federal and federally-supported state health, education and survival services they need.  It's the cold reality of stuff that isn't being built with federal funds or for federal agencies (like the Pentagon) that means private businesses must lay off people, and the economy takes numerous hits.

It's also clear that Republican governments in the states, having already denied needed help to the most vulnerable through the sequester, already manipulating the Affordable Care Act to make healthcare less accessible to the most vulnerable, are happy to use the shutdown to inflict further cruelty on the poor, the sick and the old--as in Arizona, which has stopped welfare payments.  Stopped them.

Maybe it's time that the GOP own the slogan once applied to Exxon:

We don't care.  We don't have to care.  We're Republicans.