Are Shuttered Gov't Sites Actually Saving Money? 668
Lots of U.S. government agencies' websites are partly or fully shut down, many of them with messages like this one, from the front page of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: "Effective 7 p.m. EDT, Friday, 4 October 2013, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) temporarily suspended all US operations because of the US Federal government shutdown. All NRAO facilities and buildings are closed; NRAO personnel, other than a skeleton crew, are on furlough and cannot respond to emails or phone calls." Brian Doherty argues at Reason that many of these shutterings don't actually seem to make any financial sense, and that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence. If you're involved with running an organizational web site (government-funded or not), do you agree?
"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when does the majority of the actions of the US Government make "financial sense"? This is about what is required, not what is saving money. I've heard from various news sources that the shutdown, itself, *costs* millions per day. By that logic, "financial sense" would have been to not shutdown in the first place.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of these actions are clearly not "required". Park facilities that don't normally have round-the-clock security are now being patrolled and guarded by park rangers who have been told to keep everyone out. The logic doesn't make sense because these are facilities that don't have any services being discontinued that would necessitate a total closure of the lands and monuments during a government shutdown. It is purely punitive action designed to make regular people suffer in the hopes they whine to their congressman about the budget negotiations.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is not what costs more or less money. The government has money. What the government doesn't have is the authorization from congress to spend it. It doesn't matter that the normal funds for running the park cost less than the park rangers. The rangers are authorized and running the park is not. The way our system works is that no money can be spent without a formal authorization from congress and right now we don't have that. They passed a law a while back to continue funding "essential" services during this time but we don't get to pick and choose based on what makes financial sense.
This is the downside of having a government of laws not men. Without the law we can't do anything even if common sense says it should be so. Want common sense, Congress needs to pass a law.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Insightful)
If the executive isn't authorized to spend money, which is better: To post signs saying "This facility is closed and unstaffed", or to deploy armed guards in order to keep people away from open-air facilities that are usually unstaffed and unsupervised?
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, we are no longer citizens, but subjects who may or may not go on our land at the whim of the those who rule by our consent.
At least, that is the way it is supposed to work. Our land, our public servants, not the other way round.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we are no longer citizens, but subjects who may or may not go on our land at the whim of the those who rule by our consent.
Huh? OK, I'm not allowed to go into a national park while there are no federal employees to keep me safe or respond to problems. I'm also not allowed to build a burger stand or an oil well in the middle of a national park either. Neither of these things makes it any less "my" land. Part of the whole point of a national park is that not just any jackass can do anything they want with it even though it's "their" land - it is held in trust for us all by the government.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
Government owned lands are not public in the sense you suggest. They are a public "trust," which means the government holds the lands in trust for the benefit of the public (theoretically). This is to distinguish us from England, where the lands are owned by the crown, and has no legal incentive to provide any benefit from the lands to the public.
Just like other trust funds, the trustee controls and decides what produces the highest benefit, and is largely free to do just about anything, even screw it up, so long us the trust is managed in good faith.
I make no statement on the usefulness or fairness of this legal construction, I am merely pointing out how it works.
Re: (Score:3)
In the UK, the land is owned by the Crown, but it is not their private property and they have no control over it. The Crown Estate manage the land, and any surplus revenue goes to HM Treasury (essentially, the finance/economy department of government), with 15% of the net revenue going to the monarch (this is essentially the income they get to carry out their duties as head of state). The Crown Estate is ultimately accountable to Parliament, and an annual report is submitted to both the Monarch and Parliame
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the contrary, these lands are indeed "public property" as in commonly owned by all of the American people jointly. I can't say how that is done in other countries, but it is not a "public trust" as you are implying. Federal lands are those places to which were simply left over after everything else was claimed. In many cases it is land that is so utterly worthless (or was seen as worthless when stuff like the Homestead Act was in place) that nobody wanted that land. Yes, there are certain exceptions
Re: "Financial Sense" (Score:3)
You initially say (correctly) that the shutdown is about not spending money, but later slyly morph that into not being allowed to "run" facilities, and characterize failure to block access as "running", so as to prove that blocking access is required by the shutdown. Sorry, but sitting back and doing nothing is less aptly called "running" than is spending extra money to prevent access. And the additional spending clearly violates your original definition of a shutdown.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Many of the shuttered parks *do not* even get federal funds, so you are wrong, and in the cases where they do, there is no cost to keep them open beyond the park rangers that they're *already spending money on*.
the park has costs... those costs are for people visiting. hence people cannot visit if there isn't budget for it(as if the money put into the park already was getting "spent" when people visit and trample the paths etc).
makes perfect sense, no? of course not, but it makes most sense in the whole shutdown debacle.
people can't even volunteer to keep the museums open because it's against the law to accept that volunteer work(to keep people employed).
what you really need is an overhaul of the duo-party system.
Bicameral system (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with the parliamentary system, you have two houses. The lower house is supreme in matters of funding. If the House of Commons were to reject funding for Program X (whether that be the UK's involvement in Afghanistan or whatever), that would be the end of the matter.
There'd be nothing the House of Lords could do about it.
Here, the lower house has rejected funding for a certain program, and the upper house is refusing to recognize the lower house's power of the purse.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
I agree that our system is broken, but not necessarily for the reasons you state.
The President does not 'oversee' Congress -- Congress, the Executive, and the Judicial are separate, independent branches of our government. This ensures, among other things, that even if Congress is deadlocked (as it is now), we can't have a situation where there is no government -- like happened in certain European countries recently where they couldn't form a government for months. Of course, that's not to say that guarantees we have a functional government (outside of military)...
The real problem with Congress, particularly in the House, is the two-party system and archaic rules that allow a minority of representatives to block any action even when the other party has sufficient votes to pass a measure.
A primary reason for the two-party system is because of the (gerrymandered) way that all of our representatives are elected from fixed all-or-nothing districts. If multiple seats were elected at once in overlapping districts, with a ranked voting system as seen in parliamentary governments, third parties would have a viable chance of getting elected and disrupting the duopoly.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:4, Interesting)
The President does not 'oversee' Congress -- Congress, the Executive, and the Judicial are separate, independent branches of our government. This ensures, among other things, that even if Congress is deadlocked (as it is now), we can't have a situation where there is no government -- like happened in certain European countries recently where they couldn't form a government for months.
The difference is that in the Belgian case services stayed open and government employees were paid even though they had no government.
America, unable to achieve the administrative competence of Belgium.
Oh, yeah, icing on the cake:
Belgium has one of the best healthcare systems in Europe.
Medical care is publicly funded through the compulsory state insurance system which covers the majority of the population, along with a number of private schemes.
http://www.expatfocus.com/expatriate-belgium-healthcare-medical [expatfocus.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Seriously. They are trying to restrict anybody from entering federal lands at all. This includes the national forests and BLM land that constitute 80% plus of the western states land area. There is seldom ever a federal employee on those lands. The have specifically asked the states to enforce a new fed rule that supposedly will not allow hunting on such lands during the "crisis". The feds spend zero dollars enforcing hunting regs on such lands as federal law and rules turn that over to the state DNRs.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
AZ state offered to "reopen" the Grand Canyon.
The Feds have refused. (What did the Feds do to close the GC? Fill it in?!)
Several boat launches in the Bozeman MT area, a huge trout fishing area.
The federal agency had specifically ordered park officials in Wisconsin to close doors on Kettle Moraine, Devil’s Lake and Interstate parks, as well as sections of Horicon Marsh — sections that were owned by the state, no less — but Wisconsin authorities shunned the demand.
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keeps getting stranger:
Shut down the Ocean!
Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was “closed” due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown.
The Park Service will also have rangers on duty to police the ban of access to an ocean. The government wi
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:4, Informative)
Right. That is why they blocked off the side of the road so you can't stop to look at Mt. Rushmore.
Pure partisanship:
https://twitter.com/diana_west_/status/386543998992519168/photo/1 [twitter.com]
And I doubt AZ ever had the option to keep the Grand Canyon, it was declared a national forest preserve and a game preserve a decade before Arizona was even a state.
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The liability issue is BS. You can't sue the Federal Government unless they let you do so.
Redress would not apply here.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
The "Cliff House" restaurant in San Francisco is a privately owned and operated restaurant which is built on Federal land. It has no Federal employees. They _PAY RENT_ to the Feds.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/10/03/sf-shutdown-theater/ [pjmedia.com]
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They did that to an inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/4/blue-ridge-hotel-defies-park-service-shutdown/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS [washingtontimes.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Like most restaurants, one DRIVES to it.(If you'd ever been there - or bothered to look at the linked article's photo - you'd have seen that.) There's no on-site parking; parking is on the public SF streets. Yes, there's a stairway down to the beach, but the front door faces a city street.
I think you'll find I've been there more recently than you. But the fact that you drive to the Cliff House (personally, I take the bus) doesn't change the fact that every single last square foot of the restaurant is on public land, owned by the National Park Service. The restaurant operates solely under a license from the National Park Service. If you look at its website, [cliffhouse.com] it says quite plainly that even the prices of its food are subject to approval by the National Park Service.
It's been a while since I was there, so I don't recall if there are Federal Marshalls as lifeguards, but I suspect not.
If you don't know, why boast
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also a chain of privately managed campgrounds; again, NO Federal employees. They've been ordered to close - even though they've stayed open in previous "shutdowns".
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/10/02/shutdown-white-house-ordering-privately-run-privately-funded-parks-to-close/ [pjmedia.com]
“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/3/pruden-the-cheap-tricks-of-the-game/ [washingtontimes.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Search and Rescue? Very expensive, and hardly essential, since members of the public are not supposed to be in the parks in the first place.
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BLM lands are still open, you may visit and use undeveloped lands as you would normally. It is only the facilities that are closed.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
Over the course of any given week, every National Park I am aware of could easily become a high risk situation from any number of natural events. A very simple example is a camper going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, or another with a snake bite, and no staff on duty with the walkie-talkie that would alert base who in turn would call in the resources to keep the person alive.
It is understandable that the USA National Parks would not want to be hit with negligence lawsuits were this to happen. And it would definitely happen: most visitors to national parks are not prepared to handle emergencies on their own. And there are an awful lot of park visitors-- the probability that someone would get into serious trouble approaches 1.000.
While there is a cost to shutting down the National Parks, keeping them open without the personnel that keep the park experience safe would be the crime of creating an attractive nuisance. The Park Service has a legal duty to not only shut down when staff is furloughed, but to patrol to keep persons out.
Re: (Score:3)
Obama himself has decided that certain parts of "his" law would be harmful and has instructed his agencies not to enforce those parts. Given that fact, are you also admitting that Obama does not have your "best interest" in mind?
Re: (Score:3)
The government has the money to spend on either. But it is only authorized by Congress to do one of the two. If federal employees do what you suggest, they are subject to arrest (yes, arrest, not just firing). This is not something that Obama decided on—it's the law, passed by Congress. If you think it should be handled differently, call your congresscritters.
Re:"Financial Sense" (Score:5, Informative)
IANAL, nor a politician, but IMHO the furloughs are not about saving money.
They are a result of the federal government not having authorization to spend any money.
It's like a company in bankruptcy proceedings, the curator takes over and protects the assets while working to get the best outcome for the creditors.
"these are facilities that don't have any services being discontinued"
If that were true, nobody would be unhappy with their closure, and those places wouldn't be a very safe place to be even before the government shutdown (no maintained roads and trails, no and safety equipment, no animal control/fire/law enforcement/first aid service, etc).
What it's about is both preventing damage to assets and preventing spending of any money not deemed absolutely essential, which they have been instructed to do from the top down.
If a website needs a security update for a zero-day exploit, or gets hacked or vandalized during the furlough, the IT guys are not allowed to do anything about it because they are on furlough. They are not deemed essential employees and therefore they can not do work, any work, including volunteering to support the website (nothing they can do about that, in fact they can get in trouble for breaking those rules). We should be lucky that there is a webpage with a notice: They could have simply powered the machines (cloud, whatnot) off. What if the air conditioning turns off and the server room overheats, or there is some kind of water leak in the room, damaging the running server(s)? If I was responsible for an Internet-exposed website, and I was instructed to protect the assets with only absolutely essential expenditures, and I would be guaranteed not to be able to do anything for it for an indefinite amount of time and there was nobody willing and able to take on the responsibility during my absence, I would shut it down too, to prevent being faulted for anything happening to it in my absence.
If inside a national park an accident or crime happens that needs for example a road closure, a rescue, a fire department t respond, or an arrest (for example, for damaging public property, public intoxication, etc), then the government can't help and can't control the damage because there is no authorization to spend any money to pay for the work and materials of the rescue, fire control, etc. So the best way to prevent damage in the park is to completely close access to it.
never before. Reagan didn't, Clinton didn't (Score:4, Informative)
When hasn't this happened you asked. The Lincoln Memorial the Washington Monument, etc. have NEVER been closed like this. This stunt is an Obama original. The democrats defunded Reagan three times. He didn't spend money closing parks. Clinton took a small step in this direction by furloughing park service employees, resulting in parks that had federal staff being closed. He didn't spend extra money closing open air landmarks.
While the worst that's ever happened.before was that federal employees were sent home, Obama has spent more money posting federal agents to block access to private businesses that happen to have a federal contract. No president before has come anywhere near this ludicrous stunt.
Re:never before. Reagan didn't, Clinton didn't (Score:4, Informative)
Congress passed a law, long ago in the past, that forbids the Government from keeping those facilities open without an appropriation and assesses penalties to individual workers if they provide any services, even volunteer, without an appropriation. Obama did not write that law or sign it. He has no discretion to keep any of that open; if there are park rules that say that areas that are open have to be cleaned or otherwise maintained, then they have to be closed during the shutdown.
Try using your brain and thinking about these things instead of just repeating anything anti-Obama. I'm sure if you restricted yourself to true arguments, you could still represent contrary opinions. Is Obama so perfect at everything that only lies can be used to complain? Wow.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Furloughed employees will not receive back pay. They are ordered not to work and can't legally do so. Employees deemed essential must work, but they won't be paid until Congress authorizes the funds.
democrites vs repugnicants (Score:3)
that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence
You mean, the populist faction of the Neocon Corporate Party could possibly do something just to put the public blame on the authoritarian faction? That cannot be!
Re: (Score:3)
that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence
You mean, the populist faction of the Neocon Corporate Party could possibly do something just to put the public blame on the authoritarian faction? That cannot be!
You got an alternative?
My problem with third parties is not with the idea in principle. When I interned in Canada's Parliament I was with the NDP, which was at the time fourth. My problem is that they consist mostly of people who have no idea how the American system of government actually functions. Jason Amash and Dennis Kucinich do not exist in Canada because their party leaders would simply refuse to sign their nomination papers, and their Riding Associations would be forced to re-run the Caucus that nom
Re: (Score:3)
that the sites are down more as a public statement than out of fiscal prudence
You mean, the populist faction of the Neocon Corporate Party could possibly do something just to put the public blame on the authoritarian faction? That cannot be!
Well... The Neocon Corporate Party favors a smaller government without all these "non-essential" programs and services. Parks and monuments - part of, built and/or maintained by the government - are technically non-essential, so closing them gives us all a chance to see what the smaller government envisioned would look like...
I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:4, Interesting)
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I heard the FDA had already stopped food safety inspections on imported food. But I think there is no way to verify that because the people you'd have to contact to tell you about it are furloughed :(
Re:I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:5, Insightful)
but either way shutting the gov't sites is a great way to remind people that gov't does things they want done.
Uh-huh. Nice monument there. It would be a shame if someone barricaded it off. The shutdown is revealing government's true nature - a bunch of petty extortionists. Give us money, or we'll shut down things that you like. Not because we can't afford it - it will actually cost us money - but because we can.
Re: (Score:3)
Bullshit. It is written into the law which parts of government get shutdown when a budget isn't passed.
And no government cannot afford it, they don't have authority by law to spend what they have, and they will blow through the debt ceiling in 2 weeks.
Yes, it will cost America money, but it won't cost the government money (the shutdown, that is). At least initially, it won't cost them money. It will cost them to restart the government.
And the first bozo to get injured in a Fed. park during the government sh
Re: (Score:2)
So what, it's not really extortion if the mafia burns down your local pizza place for not paying protection money, as pizza isn't essential? Nothing about extortion requires it to be essential.
The guards probably keep all the tigers away from the monuments, too. It must be working - I don't see any tigers. Exactly how many Americans have been killed by terrorist attacks on monuments again?
Re:I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mm. I don't think that an attempt to attach a defunding that has failed to pass congrees 40-odd times to a budget bill can count as anything but political theatre.
Re: (Score:2)
With all the small gov't Tea Party blather out there it's nice for Americans to be reminded that gov't is a tool, and one they depend on. I for one don't want to see EPA regulation, anti-slavery and usury laws, OSHA Safety and FDA regulations go away.
Maybe if the shutdown goes on long enough people will start to miss government. But I doubt in the short term that a small number of websites used by a small number of people is going to have any impact on how people view government. In fact the more people will probably think something like "the government shut down and everything is just fine why do we need so much government".
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget that it was the federal government that codified slavery and segregation in the first place.
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Good thing no once decided that it could not be changed... unlike the sacred ACA.
Re:I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:4, Informative)
BS. Complete and utter twaddle.
Slavery was codified by the States before there was a Federal government. Virginia, in particular, took a leading role in creating the rules that allowed slavery. Under English law there were no slaves, just Serfs, and Serfdom was a) incredibly rare, and b) a lot nicer then slavery. Under slavery you could get home from a hard days work and discover your toddler was on a boat to New Orleans to cover Mas'r's gambling debts. Under serfdom both you and your toddler were tied to a specific Estate, which meant neither could be forcibly moved out of town.
Segregation was never codified under any Federal statute. The Military was segregated, which meant lots of military regulations were racist, but Segregation as a policy was created by the states and enforced by the states.
Re: I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:3)
The same government that did all those good things also monitors everything you do on the internet and tracks all of your cellphone calls. Plus as an added bonus, it nearly randomly bombs people in countries we are not at war (or even kinetic action) with.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Don't believe me? Compare Senator Obama's statements to Emperor Obama's statements. He quickly learned from Bush that an imperial administration is aided by being at war.
Re:I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly! Without the Federal Government, we wouldn't have a national highway system, NASA and space technology (GPS satellites...), the Internet, nuclear power/energy (and weapons...), etc. not to mention some protection against corporations externalizing all their pollution somewhere else, and considering the occasional mass poisoning a business/PR expense.
Republicans were already posing on day one of the shutdown, at War Memorials in DC, feigning shock that a shutdown actually shut stuff down.
Re: (Score:2)
Because smaller governments are magically more effective?
people would live in nice places? oh no! (Score:3)
"People would all move to the states that have [nice stuff]". Wouldn't that be horrible, if people lived in nice places.
California and Texas were of similar size, but opposite political policies. When the policies in California failed, people and businesses moved in droves out of California to Texas. California has seen that and very slowly started to implement policies more like the Texas approach that has worked. When different states try different things, people can move to states that do things t
Re:I don't know if Obama planned it this way... (Score:4, Interesting)
It did not happen before we had a strong government, why would it happen if we reduced some of that strong government?
3 words: the Civil War.
1861-1865 is a perfect example of how a weak central government in a country the size of the US causes an extreme polarity: in politics, in economics, the infrastructure, the very way of life between different areas of the country; as well as the potentially disastrous results.
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Actually, that's not yet a given one way or the other - unless the measure past in the last couple of hours - though in the past furloughed workers (during shutdowns, as opposed, to, say, the sequester) have been paid retroactively.
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And this is why Obamacare is getting a bad rap. Too many people spewing things they don't know anything about, either maliciously or ignorantly.
Not only has this been discussed in DC already, but it passed the house already 407-0.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/05/government-shutdown-back-pay_n_4049377.html [huffingtonpost.com]
Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine it costs less to defend against and clean up after DDoS or XSS attacks on a static page, than it does against an active web site.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Informative)
Parked (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Sure (Score:5, Informative)
Any infrastructure requires maintainace. Maybe not daily, but certainly periodic. Anyone who runs a website knows that they can't be left on autopilot for a month. Given that this shutdown is open ended, it simply makes more sense to turn things off that do not have funding rather than come back in later, when people are not being paid, and do a controlled shutdown.
There is also the issue of security. It would be a great idea to leave all the infrastructure open when all these disgruntled employes who were laid off with almost no notice have nothing better to do than play hacker. So many private firms have had so much success allowing access to their computers to laid off employees.
As far as national parks go, there may not be fully staffed, but there is a probably a park ranger to help with issues Most people do expect services. It is better to close the park than to have to recall some laid off employee in an emergency. Which is what is happening now in louisinan/alabama/missisipi/florida. You would think these sates who are so supportive of the shutdown would support themselves.
That said, there would be ways to turn on more services. Congress could pass the bill that guarantees federal employess back pay. It is there and it only requires the House to agree. The congress could also vote to open all public facing agencies with a skeleton staff. This would amount to giving some a paid vacation while others would have to work, but there we go. We could open websites and state parks and the memorials.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone really believe the facilities they shut down are due to lack of funds?
All the actually expensive stuff is "essential", and they keep paying for it. Instead, they pay people to barricade off open-air monuments, and to add modify websites to become non-functional; they pay rangers to stop people from "recreating" in national parks. It's fairly obvious that the shutdown is just Washington Monument Syndrome writ large.
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Food stamps run out in three weeks. Medicaid in DC has been shut down. Most military contractors aren't being paid, even if they're delivering goods. Social Security and Medicare are fine, but that's because they have their own budget not because they've been "deemed essential." So of the top three expense of the government one has been severely curtailed (Defense), Health has been affected (if only in DC), and Social Security alone remains unaffected. Lesser bills (like those pesky food stamps) have varyin
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very, very expensive to move out of your home and then back in again, even to the same home. But if you don't -- for whatever reason -- have the money to pay the rent, that may well be your only choice.
If you're expecting to have the money but your boss's accounting department is simply incompetent, you might be able to plead with your landlord. Or maybe not.
But whether staying at home or moving out is cheaper is irrelevant to the question when the rent check comes due.
That money is being wasted isn't the fault of the agencies that are shutting down. It's the fault of the Republicans who're holding the entire country hostage in a blatantly un-Constitutional attempt to repeal majority-supported legislation. They've tried dozens of times to repeal the legislation through the normal legislative process and failed miserably each time; now, they're determined to wreck the national economy (with the shutdown) and possibly even the global economy (with the default) if the majority doesn't give in to their demands. They've shot multiple prisoners already (don't forget the ongoing sequester!) and are now threatening to blow up the whole building.
In a modern democracy, their actions would long ago have resulted in the dissolution of the government and a new round of elections. And the Obama administration's support for the NSA wiretapping would also have triggered elections. Such a shame we live in a place that's rested so much on its laurels and is now so far behind the times.
Cheers,
b&
Re:Missing the point (Score:4, Informative)
Though if we're going to be precise, it's not just "the Republicans" but factionalism and the Speaker's inability to command respect from members of his own party. (This isn't a particularly partisan statement - or at least, observers from both the left and right have reached the same conclusion.)
Party on! (Score:3)
And now Congress is considering legislation to assure that furloughed workers get back pay for the vacation.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/04/obama-backs-backpay-furlough-shutdown/2923221/ [usatoday.com]
Forget about sites... (Score:2)
Not complaining about where I am (I like the travel), just pointing out that the reimbursement for my work and the logistics I've had to line up as a contractor, in my case, have far exceeded the cost of keeping the people who are responsible and proficient at this work on for another few da
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
defense (Score:3)
Well, duh, it costs them basically no money to leave a web server running as long as the web server has no failures and is not attacked. But do you want a government server up and running when you know that there will be no one available to deal with any problems that may come up???
This has jack to do with saving money (Score:3)
This has nothing to do with saving money and everything to do with spending money. This is a very important distinction as there is an old law that strictly prohibits spending money during a shutdown. If you spend money on something that isn't a critical you risk serious legal consequences. I am not defending the shutdown or either party.
That being said shutdowns do end up costing more money than they save by the time they ramp things back up. Minnesota had a shutdown a while back where the government shut down over a similar stubborn argument. The shutdown ended up costing millions of dollars more than it saved because it caused massive delays in road construction projects and the like. The construction companies (and others) sued for costing them money and the state paid out a hell of a lot of money.
Funding is from National Science Foundation (Score:3)
The funding for NRAO comes from the National Science Foundation, which is funded by the federal government. When an appropriations bill was not passed, NSF did not get any money, so they could not give any money to NRAO to continue operating. The National Science Foundation could not authorize NRAO to continue operating without funding. So, in short, this isn't being done to save money, it's being done because there is no money.
Short answer: Yes, it makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Longer answers as to why:
1. As someone else mentioned, a simple static page is a lot less vulnerable to attack or disruption than a functional page.
2. Bandwidth costs are lower, since all you have are people hitting the site, seeing the shuttering, and going away again, rather than actually using it.
3. Anything behind the front page, such as databases, can and probably are shut down completely, saving on power and bandwidth.
4. Information provided on sites that aren't updated is likely to be inaccurate, which is worse than no information at all.
5. The cost to shutting them down can't have been all that high, since here's the process: (1) Have a developer make a static "We're not open for business" page, (2) have your admins configure front-end webservers with a mod_rewrite (or equivalent) to direct all traffic to that page, (3) shut down anything that's not a front-end webserver. Yes, it wasn't free, but my guess is whoever is coming up with the costs is factoring in paying the tech staff they already had on salary to do the work.
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing." It's sort of like the reaction if you are told to remove everything from a messy room and start throwing absolutely everything out.
It's about putting pressure on the GOP (Score:2)
http://www.examiner.com/article/park-ranger-admits-being-told-to-make-life-as-difficult-for-people-as-possible [examiner.com]
A federal Park Service Ranger admitted being ordered to make life as difficult as possible in order to make Americans feel the most pain as a result of the partial government shutdown ... Same happened at the beginning of the sequester..
It's all for show: example of why (Score:4, Interesting)
Well duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
They've furloughed IRS employees. Does *that* make financial sense? They've shut down FDA food inspection. Does *that* make financial sense, if we count the cost to the nation of food borne illness? This shutdown is about many things, but "financial sense" is not one of them.
We live in a country full of idiots who say things like "Keep the government out of my Medicare," without realizing that Medicare *is* a government program. Many more understand that things like the military or NIH cancer research are part of the gummint, but only on an intellectual level. On a visceral level they only associate the government with things they don't like, such as pollution regulation. The stuff they *do* like apparently just happens, as far as they're concerned.
So put yourself in the shoes of the zookeeper who has to take care of the pandas as the National Zoo. Pandas don't stop eating or shitting because Speaker of the House doesn't have the balls to bring a clean continuing resolution bill to the floor. So you've still got to show up to feed them and muck out their enclosure, only now you're not being paid. Your landlord still wants paying; the grocery store still wants paying, the daycare center you leave your kids at so you can go to this job still wants paying, but *you* don't get paid.
Wouldn't *you* pull the plug on the panda-cam? If you *don't*, people *will* say, "look, we shut the government down but things are still working." Yes they *are* that stupid. So you pull the plug so they'll understand that things like the pandas being cared for just don't "happen" on their own. Sure, people get pissed off, but they're not paying for the panda cam so they can lump it. Not seeing Mei Xiang and her cub isn't going to kill anyone. They weren't paying for panda cam anyway; that was paid for with a grant from corporate sponsorship, so if anyone has a beef with this, it'd be Ford Motor Company.
Re:Well duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Do you honestly believe there will be some disease outbreak because a government bureaucrat wasn't present to check a box on a form that only the allowable level of rat feces was present?
As a matter of fact, I do. It's not like outbreaks of foodborne illnesses are rare. Major outbreaks happen in the US every year or two, and smaller outbreaks are contained all the time before they get big. If there's an E. coli outbreak in lettuce or listeria in hamburger, who do you think tracks it down to the source and tells all the supermarkets which food to take off the shelves? The food safety fairies?
You can be complacent about food borne illness because government bureaucrats (and scientists, engineers and information technologists) keep contamination in American food to manageable levels. Worldwide, the third most common cause of death is diarrhoeal diseases, most of which are food or water borne,
I've never worked with the FDA, but I've worked with the CDC as a contractor. I happened to be at the Fort Collins DVBID one time when they were scrambling a team to investigate an outbreak of some mysterious hemorrhagic fever in Africa. People were fleeing the area but the CDC's team was going in. Why do they do that kind of thing? So whatever it was that had people bleeding out of their eyeballs never finds its way over here. People just *assume* that things like Yellow Fever, Dengue or Malaria just don't happen here in the US. They never stop to consider that this is not a natural state of affairs. We used to have that stuff all the time. You just don't see all the hard work that goes into making Yellow Fever something most Americans have never heard of. I have -- the zoologists, epidemiologists,physicians and veterinarians who provide this "non-essential service."
I've had this very same argument with a guy who was blase about losing one of our meteorological satellites. "Hurricanes don't kill many people," he said. I wanted to grab the blockhead by the collar and shake him. What would have happened if people only had two days notice with Sandy? Or with Katrina or Hurricane Andrew? Complacent idiot.
Bullshit (Score:3)
The willful stupidity here is incredibly massive, and I have no sympathy at all for those propagating it.
What part of "shutdown" do the tea party types not understand? The Government operates at the pleasure of the Congress, as expressed in the yearly budget. If the Government has no budget, it cannot operate (except for a few pieces that run on fees or other direct income). Whether it makes financial sense to close any particular part in the absence of a budget is irrelevant.
There is this fiction, that everyone agrees to accept, that there are "essential" parts that have to keep going, such as much of the DOD, but, really, those should be shut too. What is essential is set by each agency well in advance of any shutdown; if the Congress does not like any particular agency's policy, in this or any other matter, they can and should hold hearings about it. What is of course really going on here is a fairly pathetic attempt to deflect the proper blame by bleating about parking lots being closed and other irrelevancies, when a simple open vote in the House would fix this within a single afternoon.
Hell yes (Score:3)
If the sysadmins have to go home, then hell yes, shuttering the sites is absolutely the right thing to do.
the shutdown is stupid (Score:4, Funny)
this stupid stunt that politicians pulling by shutting down the federal government is foolish at best.
when can we hold elections to replace those that have caused this shutdown?
Maybe ... if they got hacked. (Score:3)
In the planning two years ago, we were told that the reason for shutting off servers was that we coudn't patch them while we were out ... and if they got hacked, we weren't allowed to go and fix them (or monitor to discover it happened) ... so it'd potentially leave someone with access during the length of the shutdown.
The resulting cleanup would be horrible for everyone involved, depending on the agency's security policies. (our are a wipe, and reinstall the OS from original media (which is much trickier these days due to how software gets distributed) ... then reinstall the software (can't simply install from a previous image).)
In my opinion, leaving servers on with a message is an absolutely horrible thing to do. GSA gave out bad advice in my opinion, as it's going to start getting cached by search engines the way they told people to do it. (302 redirections, not serve a 503 message).
And they just gave people a PNG to include ... which if people put it up directly without re-copying it all in alt-text, is a section 508 violation.
They *should* have done this with a static server per agency (or network), and some rules at the firewalls to redirect all port 80 traffic to it, other than those who had exemptions to keep running for whatever reason.
This is the end... (Score:5, Interesting)
What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.
Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.
Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?
The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.
And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?
Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.
I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.
And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)
Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.
Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.
In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.
Re:This is the end... (Score:5, Interesting)
And as for how this happened?
Well, it was a series of mistake the Republicans made over the decades. Mistakes that made it harder and harder for the Republicans to shift their positions, and harder and harder to attract new people.
And demographics continued to happen. And then they elected George W. Bush, which sped things up by about half a decade. And it because clear, about 2000 or so, they'd either have to shift their positions or cheat.
They couldn't shift their positions. (In fact, the one policy failure of the Bush administration was the attempt to shift positions on immigration.) Their position had calcified. They had let too many people in their party based on attacking those societal shifts, and couldn't change those things now.
So...they 'cheated'. (Note I'm not saying there was any lawbreaking. I mean cheating in the sense of not playing by commonly accepted rules.)
1) They rigged things so that they'd stay in power with less and less people, via gerrymandering. (They've sorta been doing this for a while, but 2000 is where it took off.)
2) They started inventing completely amazing attacks on Democrats. The much-vaulted 'civility' completely disappeared at the hands of the Republicans. (This arguable started under Clinton.)
But this backfired horribly. Either of those alone might have been okay, but when you put them together, when you create Republican-safe districts and Republicans and Fox News yammers on and on about how evil anything to do with the Democrats are...
And thus the Tea Party was born. In 2009, just in time to get elected to local government for the census, for more redistricting, making each district even more extreme.
The problem is...these victories just made the Republican's problems worse. Now they were even more extreme and had more of a problem. So, to keep power, we see stuff like reducing access to the ballot box, and nonsense like that.
And now you get a government shutdown to try to appease the extremists. Which will, of course, just makes things even worse electorally. To remain viable, the party must moderate itself, and it cannot moderate itself thanks to the system it set up to stay in power.
People think political parties die because they're no longer 'relevant'. But that's not really it. A political party die because instead of choosing to stay relevant, it tries (And succeeds for a short time) to rig the game to stay in power while continuing to be irrelevant, so it keep attracting less and less relevant people. Until the entire thing implodes.
The fact is...the Republican party is dead. It's thrashing around and can do massive harm as it goes down, but it really has no exit from where it is. I'm not entirely sure whether what's going on right now are the final death throes, but at this point, it's going to see its power reduced at basically every election. (Remember, it didn't even win a majority of votes cast for the House.)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, it is pretty damn callous to deny WWII vets a chance to visit their own memorial. I'm sure that even the officer can see the stupidity, she just can't make that sort of opinion known to the whole world.
There's no good reason that the memorial *has* to be closed, it's just a memorial, not dangerous park full of bears and wildlife. They're likely paying more for these extra patrols to *keep people out* than they would during a normal patrol of the national mall and surrounding areas when to
Re: (Score:3)
Dude,
I don't know if you noticed but their "right" to visit a government facility was not denied. They were inconvenienced, because they had to go through this woman and take down a fence, but they got there.
OTOH millions of people will not be able to eat next month because food stamps will run out of money. That's callous, and you don't seem to care.
As for closing the park, who do you think mows the grass? Who do you think cleans up when some drunk breaks a bottle? How quick would the government be sued if
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, how hard would it be for the Dems to recruit a handful of Republicans over to their side for a funding bill?
They already tried.
The 22 or so Republicans that said they'd vote for a "clean CR" to their constituents and the press in their home states .... didn't. They wouldn't sign the Discharge Petition, which would bypass the Speaker, to bring it to the floor.
So there you go.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:2)
So they just... give up? Try harder. If there is a car in your lane coming straight at you, you don't say, "Well, he's in the wrong lane, so I'm not moving!"
And this is without even considering why we are talking about failure to pass a last-second CR, when their job is to budget for the entire year and they have the whole freaking year to do it. No, this is a complete failure of Washington culture. I can't believe they got outsmarted by such a small minority.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't seem yo understand how hard this is.
The reason we have a months-long budgeting process is that Congress is basically two Committees with more then 500 members, and they aren't run under Robert's Rules of Order. They are run under two different sets of rules, which are completely unique. When one of the Houses decides to delay things there isn't a lot you can do.
The issue in this case is that the Speaker is dictator of what the House of Representatives gets to vote on. He can only be over-ridden by a) firing him, or b) get a lar ge proportion of the House to sign a Discharge Petition. But discharge petitions on bills you just wrote on Monday, because you were convinced that nobody would shut the government down, CAN'T be considered until 30 days after Monday. Discharge petitions on older bills are possible, but when the Democrats tried one the 20 or so Republicans who claimed they'd support a "clean bill" decreed that this discharge petition didn't count as a clean bill.
The problem seems to be the GOP members are convinced that if they don't support the Speaker in every way that matters the Tea Party will murder them in the next primary. Since ethics rules exist, Obama can't just say "Dude, if you vote for this bill Apple board member Al Gore will totally take care of you."
Moreover most of them actually believe that shutting the government down is the Right Thing to do because a) they actually believe ObamaCare is Evil, and b) they actually think that they'll convince enough Democrats to support a delay of ObamaCare to delay ObamaCare. To them trading a few months of government services for a delay of ObamaCare is just common sense.. OTOH the Democrats are equally adamant that ObamaCare is a Great Thing Which Will Save America, that delaying it is Evil, and that getting no government for three months in exchange for not delaying ObamaCare for a year is a great idea. And if anybody was willing to give on either of these points he wouldn't have made it through a Primary.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
You are writing as if they didn't have a whole goddamn year to do this.
And you are writing as if the Republican Party hasn't chased after the "energy" of the Teabaggers for years, thinking they can control the derp. The "dog that finally caught the car" that was referenced yesterday by Rep. John Dingell is /not/ about the shutdown despite what he thinks and what the media is reporting. The "dog that finally caught the car" and is in terror are the "mainstream" Republicans like Boehner (you know, the Speaker) of the Republican Party who are now terrified of being primaried out by morons like Rand Paul and "Ted" Cruz in 2014. Because they're not obstructionist enough.
You should read the cheerleading comments by the barely literate on Ted Cruz's Facebook page. Fucking scary, actually.
We need to seriously reconsider how we handle electing these clowns.
When you leave primary elections up to the people with too much time on their hands and not enough intelligence that vote for populist morons that pander to them, you get what you pay for. Clown shoes everywhere.
On a related note, the "clean CR" is based on the budget numbers that the Republicans themselves set, based on Paul Ryan's stuff. This "The Democrats Won't Negotiate" talking point is complete nonsense and anyone who pays attention for 5 minutes knows it. The Republicans are getting what they want with the budget with this CR, and that's what's hilarious about it. The Republicans could have claimed victory with the budget with this CR but they can't because they have to somehow save face with this shutdown that they let themselves get talked into over the ACA. Because the Mike Lees and Ted Cruzes (teabaggers to the core) of the House wanted to create as much pain as possible and hope that the public is dumb enough to blame anyone but them for this boneheaded "plan" they cooked up between themselves in their own little echo chamber and convinced their buddies that "this will work, this time, for sure."
That's not even getting into the debt-ceiling nonsense with the teabaggers. To hear a teabagger like Rand Paul talk, it's all "kitchen-table-economics" and a default is "no big deal." As if the US Government budget is like a household budget instead of the budget of a publicly-held large corporation. Imagine if Microsoft started defaulting on its debt. Look at what happened to Bear-Stearns when they defaulted. Yeah.
--
BMO
Re: (Score:2)
And we have a sufficient number of republicans publically stating that they will vote in favor of a clean resolution to pass it were it to put to the vote.
Re: (Score:2)
Which has been subverted several times just this year.
Re: (Score:2)
From which Hastert wants to distance himself...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/10/03/former-speaker-hastert-calls-the-hastert-rule-a-misnomer/ [washingtonpost.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Boehner can bring it up for the vote whenever he wants. What in question is the political consequences of doing so. Blah, blah, blah, maybe it will cost him his speakership - but honestly, considering how much members of his own party have been willing to flout his leadership already, I'm not sure it would make that much of a difference. Do we have other digestible compromise candidates for the job in the wings?
Re: (Score:3)
The last resolution passed in the house authorized everything except enforcement of the individual mandate but the Senate (Dems) wouldn't agree to that either. In other words, Obama exempted corporations from being punished for not providing qualifying health insurance to employees, but will push this "crisis" in order to make sure that individuals are still required to have health insurance and to penalize them if they don't. Exactly who is fighting for the citizen here.
Re: (Score:3)
Both parties are equally stupid and responsible - or rather irresponsible when it comes to this.
This is a result of the election system that the US has that is far from proportional - it is a "winner takes it all" system which works for the president, but not when you are going to get people representing the people. There is also another failure in the constitution - there's no obvious clause that takes care of things like the current situation.
Of course - the constitution was written in a different time, a
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Byrd [wikipedia.org] died like 3 years ago. He fought tooth and nail to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from passing, which would have passed in the 1930's if it wasn't for people like him and the rest of the DNC at the time. Byrd was held up like a hero until he died and just yesterday Harry Reid made a speech talking about how much better it was when Byrd was in the Senate.
No, its not 148 years ago, it was yesterday.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's petty, it's vengeance, and I've had enough... how about you?
I've certainly had enough. Enough of a certain party holding a gun to the head of the country to try and defund something they voted for then decided they didn't like, even after they already changed it completely from what it originally was.
And before you try to say I'm some crazy liberal, no. I voted for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 (Johnson in 2012). But I've come to the conclusion that the leadership of the Republican party in it's current form no longer cares about the good of the country. All they care about is brinkmanship and sticking it to Obama and Democrats. In all honesty I say recall every single Congressman (any party), bar them AND their staffers from ever serving in Congress again, and start over from scratch. The whole system needs a reboot.
Re: (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Talk to Boehner and his Teahadist masters about it. RIGHT NOW all they have to do is bring a clean CR to the floor of the House and it would pass immediately. The government would be back in operation in a couple of hours.
But no, they are going use every possible mechanism of the government to force their minority view on the nation.