And on purpose!
That's been the Republican raison d'être for past how many years? Gail Collins puts it very nicely when she writes:
There was a time when passing a budget was regarded as the legislative equivalent of getting up and making your bed in the morning. But now it’s more like climbing the Matterhorn in flip-flops... NYT
So along comes Patty Murray, Democrat and Senator and able to negotiate a budget deal with Paul Ryan. And backwards, and in heels, you might say.
What Murray did was prevent another wrangle from being shoved into new year. It's beginning to look as though voting more women into Congress is really changing things for the better.
The glass ceiling is definitely cracking. And no whimpering about how they only put us in control when the government is falling apart or your company underwent one of the biggest bankruptcies in American history. We are looking on the bright side.
Meanwhile, Republican congressmen are getting special tutoring on how to talk with women, particularly on the campaign trail. “Some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be,” the House speaker, John Boehner, told reporters last week. ...NYT
John, it's not about "sensitive"; it's about sensible. What women and other adults know (and what the boys take hard) is you don't go looking for a fight. Th'merican people have learned, to their cost, that if you elect a Republican who leans too far to the right, you're electing a kid who believes torture is fun. That's where you could find fault with women: they brought up these children to think they have no responsibility to anyone but themselves. Now they need remedial classes in how to behave like citizens?
“Remedial classes on how not to say things is not progress,” said former Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine in a phone interview.
“They need better ideas, not ‘Mad Men’ style sensitivity training,” said Representative Nita Lowey of New York. Lowey, who serves as the top Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, thinks that Republicans’ problem is anti-women policies, not their inability to talk with the opposite sex.
“Believe it or not, Paul Ryan is a good friend,” she said. “He calls me Mom. I call him Naughty Boy.”...NYT
Ha ha.
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End of ha ha and on to reality. David Farenthold at the Post rounds up the results of the Republicans' 2011 "sequester."
It caused chaos. Perhaps the experience of one family in one district is illustrative of the unnecessary desperation created by the newly elected "tea party" House when it nickeled and dimed Head Start:
Another mother once told her son to steal beanbags from the play area. The family cut open the bags and cooked the beans. ...WaPo
It came down to pressure. Some could afford to apply the political pressure but Head Start was not one of them.
At the Agriculture Department, officials issued alarming warnings about furloughs among meat inspectors. They said that would mean shutdowns of slaughter plants and a $10 billion in lost agricultural production.
The meat industry lobbied. Congress gave in. Lawmakers provided $55 million in new money to keep inspectors on the job.
Head Start could have tried the same me-first tactics. It didn’t.
“There is a lot of goodwill about Head Start. And I imagine if we had chosen to say ‘Just us! Us! Us! Us!’ we might have been able to get some action,” said Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association. The group didn’t think that would be right. “We had to have a complete approach,” she said. “Because Head Start works with the whole child and the whole family.”...WaPo
